With the knowledge that it’s now no longer taking on water at the rear, sitting at the correct water line and we can easily manage the aircraft in the shallows using waders we can move onto the RC boat bit of the test. With Dave in the follow boat along with three others either driving filming or taking photos we set off for 25 minutes of testing the model at slow speeds. Dave will be able to talk in more detail but the handling seemed ok although it was hampered by weed collecting on the ski struts as you can see below.
_DSC7873 by
Alex Jones, on Flickr
The water rudders at the back which are actuated by two big Savox waterproof servos worked well and continued to work even when submerged for over 5 hours. The wind was around 8 knots and the huge vertical stabiliser did hinder things but it was still possible to turn in either direction without assymetric thrust. The full size aircraft used a combination of asymmetric thrust and rudder to turn and in the second test the water rudders were not used but it was still possible to control direction using only asymmetric thrust.