Email from Mike Smith

Hello Jaro, Jana, and everyone at Samba;

I finally had the chance to compete with the Precision in a high stakes F3B contest.

I must say that I only was worried a little about the launch performance at the start because with this being the first contest all I had done so far was my own testing and some comparisons outside of the competition environment. Duration was our first task, and I was very interested to see if I could stay aloft for 10 minutes first thing in the morning. We launched at 8:30am, and the Precision just set out on a long slow glide, ending up about 30 feet off the ground when it was time to land. I could have gotten 10min. 30 seconds :) I was able to make all of my duration times during this event. It turned out that I didn't have to make any adjustments to my launch set up, and I never thought I suffered any disadvantage in overall launch height throughout the entire contest.

In distance, the Precision is very strong. Maybe its only (very, very slight) difficiency could show up in very light conditions (dead air) distance. In these conditions, maybe the Fosa is slightly better, but then again, maybe not. I do really think that with either the Fosa, Precision or FS4, even in dead conditions the planes are evenly enough matched that the best pilot will win with either model. In good conditions, there is no doubt at all that the Precision is capable of beating any other F3B model if good decisions are made by the pilot.

In Speed, I found that the Precision is most at home. It can be flown quite heavy even in light conditions and still get respectable launches. Once the wind comes up a few miles per hour, then it can be really loaded up, and will not lose very often to those FS4s. In 8 rounds of flying against Kyle Paulson, after throwing out the slowest speed flight for each of us, The Precision averaged 960 points per round to Kyles FS4 at 950 points per round. Dave Klein's average for the 7 speed rounds was 926 points per round. I won 3 of the 8 speed rounds with Precision, and Dave Klein won 3 also with his FS4, then an FS3 and a Fosa won one speed round each.
I am sorry that I could not actually post a win for you. I made a slight mistake and hit a flag/streamer pole on my first distance flight, and was awarded a 300 point penalty. With that penalty the best I could place was 3rd (which is a team position), and without the penalty, I would have been the winner by nearly 100 points over Kyle Paulson :-) I am very happy about that.

Thank you again, and I hope all is well for you and the entire Samba Family.

Kindes regards,
Mike Smith
 

Mike and Tim