Last year was not a good year for either of my JS3. After the incident with my Chocofly JS3, which is fortunately flying again, I also had some bad luck with my scratch-built JS3 in September. We were racing triangles at our airfield in some of the most amazing thermals I’ve ever encountered, with a thunderstorm and heavy clouds coming in. I misjudged the height of the cloud coverage as well as the strength of the thermals. My JS3 was literally sucked into a dark cloud. I instinctively gave down elevator, which caused my JS3 to reappear within seconds. Unfortunately it picked up speed massively (my GPS logger later told me I hit 265kmh) which caused the winglets to flutter and torn out of the wings. After a quick check that all control surfaces were still functional, I managed to land the plane safely. The winglets were never found, and there was quite a bit of damage to the end of the outer wings, but fortunately nothing that could not be fixed.

Chocofly kindly provided me with a set of moulded JS3 winglets, which fit perfectly, saving me the task of making them myself. Fitting them and fixing the outer wings took a bit more work. Two weeks ago I then also finally managed to get the wings spray painted and today my JS3 happily took to the skies again, flying as good as ever. I love this plane.