With the conversion on the Funtana complete and  me having taken some time off work I figured today would be as good a day as any to try her out. It was Thursday afternoon and it was a lovely day for flying, nice blue sky and no wind. An educated guess told me that I would not be alone at the club strip, so I loaded the Funtana in the car and headed off to the field.
On arrival at the field it was obvious that flying was going to be out of the question, the wind was very strong and quite gusty. Frank was on the tractor mowing the strip and Guy was sitting in his car watching. According to Guy he had been here for a couple of hours and the wind had not let up in that time.
As I was here I decided to get the Funtana out and do a range check of the radio gear,  I assembled the model and wandered off across the field, transmitter in hand leaving Guy watching the model for me. All checked out ok. By this time Frank had finished mowing and wandered over to see what was happening.  A conversation started about the size of the Funtana's prop and the ground clearance problems I may run into on our grass strip. This was something that had been on my mind as I only had about 1 1/2in clearance on concrete with the tail up. By this time the wind had dropped quite a lot, so the decision was made to make a couple of high speed taxi runs down one of the strips adjoining taxiways, as the strip was not flyable due to the large clumps of freshly mown grass covering it. The first run went of without a hitch, no clearance problems, so I spun the Funtana around and started the second run, this time within about 10ft the model leapt into the air, WOPS that wasn't supposed to happen, a quick decision had to be made as the fence was looming up very quickly, I pulled back on the elevator stick and rose up over the fence and off she went.
I settled into a couple of short circuits, all seemed ok. It was about this time that the wind decided to make its presence felt again making flying very uncomfortable, the Funtana was struggling to make headway into the strong gusting winds and after uncontrollably knife edging it down the length of the strip and saving the plane hitting the ground a couple of times I started looking around for somewhere safe to put her down. As the runway wasn't an option I found an area off to the side of the strip that looked smooth enough, grass was a little long but shouldn't be a problem., I just had to get there in a strong head wind. Lining the spot up I flew her in under a bit of power and put the plane down tearing the undercarriage and mount out of the fuselage, no problem this is only the third time I will have repaired the undercarriage.
As I walked up to the model I notice it was beeping continuously and the control surfaces were all twitching. Strange I thought, must have damaged the something else. I picked up the model and started to walk back to my car with it still twitching away. Frank pulled up on the tractor and I was showing him what was happening, I sat the plane down on its nose and almost immediately the motor jumped into life and jammed the prop up in the long grass, smoke began to pour out from the cowl followed by flames. I lifted the model up out of the grass, yelling  out to Guy to get the fire extinguisher out I started to run towards Guy with model in tow. It was about now that I notice that My transmitter was turned off, how I don't know, I don't remember turning it off. I can only guess that I must have turned it off as soon as the Funtana hit the ground, makes sense that's why the model was beeping and twitching, looking for a signal.
By the time I reached Guy the flames had gone out there was still plenty of thick smoke, so Guy still gave it a wee squirt just to make sure. I removed the wing and disconnected the batteries.
On returning home I stripped the model to see just what damage had been done. Remarkably there was no damage to the Fiberglass cowl, the firewall took most of the brunt being pretty much destroyed by the fire.