We’ve been spoiled with quite a few fantastic slope days over the last few weeks. I’ve been mostly flying my Chocofly JS3 and this week also my EMB-400 Urupema. Both planes still require some fine tuning (elevator incidence, center of gravity).

The JS3 is just a dream to fly, but I need to work a bit on the aileron throw and differentiation still.

The Urupema was a bit too nervous for my liking (very aggressive on the elevator, especially at higher speeds), but with increasing the elevator incidence and moving the center of gravity forwards it seems to have improved a lot. I’ll need to do a bit more experimenting still. The plane still amazes me – it combines the characteristics of a number of my favourite planes. It has totally friendly stall behaviour (with a very low stall speed) and thermals very well. But it also accelerates immediately as soon as the nose tips down even slightly (even in full camber!) and has an almost scary speed retention.

Last Thursday Richie joined us at the slope with his EB-29R (8m, 8kg). He built the plane entirely from scratch, including plug and fuselage moulds. With 8m the wings have lots of flex in them and the plane is definitely not built for high speed flying. But it thermals incredibly well and easily does very tight turns. Due to the low wing load, it’s also a breeze to start by hand – Richie didn’t need much more than a flick with his wrist to get it airborne – so cool to see!

I took my Canon camera to the slope to do a bunch of pictures of the EB-29R for an upcoming journal article. Here you can find the best pictures from the photo shoot, as well as some earlier pictures, videos and more information on the EB-29R.