It arrived today, and I'm afraid it's another case of "close, but no cigar". It does get some things right: ailerons, a brushless motor and a decent-sized rudder, which are all missing features with the EasyStar.
It also avoids the errors of some of the other EasyStar clones, such as the AXN Floater, and at least has the servo bays on the outside of the body, not taking up room in the cockpit. (Sadly it doesn't come with servos).
But it fails badly in the design of the fuselage, which is considerably more narrow than the EasyStar. The useful width of the cockpit is 43mm, as opposed to the EasyStar's 55mm. According to flight reports, this thin nose is also vulnerable to crashes and breaks off a lot.
Here's a picture of the EasyStar (a very battered one), the Dynam HawkSky and the Phoenix nose-to-nose:
Of all the EasyStar clones, I still prefer the HawkSky, despite it having a kind funky plastic power pylon that vibrates and makes noise when flying. It's got lots of room and comes with servos already installed. Shame you can't buy it without that 72Mhz 4Ch RC gear, which you simply have to throw out when it arrives and replace with proper 7ch 2.4Ghz stuff.
Someday either Multiplex will finally update the EasyStar and ship it with a proper brushless motor and prop, or the cloners will get it right. In the meantime, I'll keep looking.
Comments
Since it is very very cheaper as compared with Multiplex Easystar, so newbies may opt for it. Anyone who has very well tried and tested Multiplex Easystar with Autopilot, should probabaly go for Skywalker as it has a large airframe yet in a foam but very strong.
Skywalker has lots of space available.....its like a football ground inside ;-)) With 6000mAh, 4S Lipo it can give you very very longer flights, that you even do not expect from it.
Advanced user won't find any thing great with this plane Xen Phoenix 140cm, as its bottom is not fpat as that of Multiplex Easystar and the fuselage is very thing so it will be very difficult for housing a 4200-4400mAh 3S Lipo inside it which is really good and required during waypoint navigation with flight time of around 45minutes.
Did you purchase a Phoenix or a Sky Surfer? If it's a Sky Surfer, can I send you money and have you ship me one?
Ron,
When the Sky Surfer first came out there was some talk an another board about Multiplex suing Banana Hobby because the Sky Surfer has the exact same specs. All of the parts are interchangeable. I'm planning on buying a pair of their wings when I decide to go with ailerons.
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