Many new things!

Daniel Tengvall - Now rockin the new Raptor E720!

I´m in a interesting phase of my flying career. Every now and then I get the feeling that I´m stuck and can´t get any further. It just do not have to do with my progress in flying skills. It´s more of a general feeling. The past year I have just been flying the same machines at the same field with the same friends. Nothing bad with this, I really love my club and all the friends and I´ve chosen to fly Mikado Logos for a reason. But the past month I´ve been walking around with a feeling that I need a new challenge and something to trigger my motivation. Isn´t it strange that some things do seem to happen for a reason? Then, on a ordinary Tuesday night, my friend Fritte called on my cell for a chat. He had some suggestion which seemed really interesting and after a few days of thinking I decided to jump on the ship. So what was it all about?

He asked me to be a part of their team. They call them selfs Eastcoastheli (www.eastcoastheli.se) and is a group of four guys located in Norrköping. I first met them three years ago and always liked to hang out with them when our roads has crossed at several funflys during the summers. They share my vision about how things should be done and they mix humor and laughter with seriousness. Fredrik, also called Fritte, Borgsjö got the organizer role in the team and he is a true entrepreneur. Morgan (Murre) is the technical guy who always manages to fix even the most challenging issues. Niklas and Johan is two feelgood guys who likes to mix flying with photographing. Amazing groups of fellas!

So of course I wanted to be a part of their team. They are collaborating with several different distributors and hobby shops in Sweden. Their main focus is to promote and review products.  My part in the team would be to fly the new Raptor E720 in a collaboration with Carrocar in Linköping. The goal is to show the machine at as many funflys as possible this year. I will also be flying Thunder Tigers new FBL system GT-5 made by Ace. If I get the opportunity to go to some competitions I will of course be there to do my best. 

Today I visited my friends in Norrköping. The goal was to finish my Raptor and hopefully do a maiden. Morgan had tried the GT-5 in a small Trex 450 so he was familiar with the system. We started the day at their great place for wrenching - a small room in the basement of the house which Morgan lives. The setup of the FBL system took a little bit more then an hour to finish. It was basically straight forward. Since I´ve only been flying Vbars the past three years all the symbols in the menu where "new" to me. But in the long run it was kind of the same settings to adjust but with different names. Later in the afternoon we headed to their flying field for a maiden flight. And the first flight was kind of uneventful. Everything was all working as we wanted. The next four flights was fun as we adjusted the system to fit my likings. Even though we didn´t reach 100 % perfection we got really close! I´m really surprised how well the GT-5 worked. The tail was rock solid. Dare I say that the precomp got better, after some changes of settings, then I ever got with my Vbars? I still need to tweak the cyclic settings a bit more before I´m fully satisfied. I am waiting for my batteries and hope to get them some day this week so I can continue flying this awesome machine next weekend!

I´m really looking forward to the upcoming summer! It will be really nice to share some summer nights with my good friends at Eastcoast heli. We has planed some demo flights and I will come back later with the exact dates. It will be a great challenge to fly and Promote the Raptor E720. This was the change I was waiting for the past months. From today on my throttle is flat out at 100%! Come on!