A glorious day at our field with the Lama in a stable hover.	A shot on the grass without the blades.	In a slow pass around the field, looking to the east of the field.
Me beside the fullscale Lama, ha ha.	An earlier shot of the Lama on the runway during construction.

As will all new models the maiden flight is always the most stressful to find out if the months of work to build and setup the model have paid off without crashing it. For this model, there were numerous test starts and engine spool ups before we ever mounted the rotor blades to shake out any problems with the radio or in the auto-start system. Its first flight was magnificent, every thing just worked fine and it hovered like it was ment to be there. Now add several more flights of tweaking the rotor head pitch to make it behave.

Most of us can cast of ground effect for our models after you have learned to fly, it becomes something you just deal with when landing or close hovering near the ground. On a 60 class model, you are out of ground effect after 4-5 feet, on the big Lama this happens after 12-14 feet which make initial flights very nervous to be that high in the air. I also learned about changes in lift over different surfaces like the runway, short mowed grass and tall field grass as the model flys across them.

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