On January 1st, 2025 our flying club hosted the first annual Mavrix Mayhem Freeze Fly.
The event advertised an action-packed day featuring RC plane flying, exhibitions, and hanging out with your friends. It was anything but those things.
My family starts brainstorming Christmas gifts in June. (My mom is a little Christmas crazy.) By the end of the summer, Greg and I had both “landed” on our respective RC Airplane requests from Santa. Greg was asking for a FMS Yak-130 and I was asking for a Freewing F-22 Raptor. We requested all the necessary LiPo batteries as well. These two planes were about all we talked about leading up to Christmas.
Christmas morning arrived and Greg and I rushed through the gate (that holds us back until the grandparents arrive at 10AM), bolting towards the fireplace to see the two large boxes left behind by Santa Claus. We immediately ripped through the paper to reveal our much coveted gifts. There were other gifts that day, but nothing compared to the Yak and the F-22.
The day after Christmas we worked with our dad to build out the planes. It was an arduous process as we have become accustomed. Greg’s Yak has a screw that was the wrong size requiring a trip to RC Country Hobby, and my F-22 did not make it clear where to put the receiver, but we persevered. After a mini vacation with our parents to Solvang (where we just talked about our planes the whole time) we returned just in time to pick up an adapter at the hobby store before it closed on New Years Eve. On January 1st, we were beside ourselves to try out our perfectly built planes that had our dad’s (the detailed engineer) stamp of approval.
As advertised the Freeze Fly had a number of exhibition flights going on when we arrived but we quickly unloaded the minivan and were ready for when they opened up the flying to “everyone else”. Once they did, we were one of the first to take the runway. My F-22 took off (in ‘safe-mode’ mind you) and immediately flipped over and slammed into the runway, shattering into pieces. Before my dad and I could digest what happened, Greg’s Yak met the same fate. Greg was inconsolable, I tried to keep it together because I’m twelve, but my heart was broken in as many pieces as my plane.
My brother and I rarely crash these days, certainly not on ‘safe’, and in such a spectacular fashion. We revisited every stop that we had taken and there was nothing that we could point to to cause the crash. While talking with our parents towards the back of the airfield, we all turned just in time to see a massive jet (we are talking one that has a price tag in excess of $10k) slam into the ground with a large boom. Then there were three or four other minor crashes while we were there with a total of fourteen on a runway that may see one crash every month or so. Clearly there was something in the air or on the ground that did not want people flying that day.
This brings us to our analysis of what happened. We feel there was radio interference that caused the large number of incidents for that day. Maybe it could have been the multiple generators lining the field that day to keep us warm? But we are suspicious that maybe our Spektrum NX8 and NX7 picked the same frequency as someone else using the same radio that day. Yes, it does sound like lightening striking twice, but there is no other reason that two planes would flip over on take off, on a perfectly clear and still day, while on safe-mode.
At the moment we have yet to fix our planes. It pains both my brother and I to look at their mangled fuselages on the plane rack in the garage but eventually we will rebuild, when the time is right. Greg wrote a heartfelt letter to FMS in the hopes that they would take pity on him and send him a coupon (to make it more affordable for him to purchase the parts), but he has yet to hear back. I am going to attempt to rebuild mine with a lot of foam tack.
We can only hope that this is the worst RC crash we will experience in 2025. Granted it was on Day 1 or 365. Fingers crossed.
