Multiplex’s Pico Cub is definitely a park flyer. The little three channel trainer is slow and gentle needing only a little room to fly, yet large enough to fly at your club field on a calm day.
The Cub is part of Multiplex’s earlier Pico series that is being retired but I found it on sale at a couple of different places. It is not made of Elapor foam so it is more brittle than the rugged Elapor.
The cub comes with a Speed 400 motor and that is how I fly it. I did upgrade to a lipo friendly ESC and use a 7.4 volt 1500 mAh battery. That set-up gets me 7 – 8 minute flights using both high and low power settings. The instructions suggest limiting the Gs to avoid wing failure so I generally fly the Cub scale-like with some flybys and figure 8 turns. With the Speed 400 motor you’re not going to get much more than that anyway. Take a look at the Pico Cub manual here.
The Cub has thick wings and horizontal stabilizers; in other words, a lot of drag. That allows it to slow down quickly. It has good slow speed characteristics with gentle stalls. With a little wind, you need to keep it close. It can take a long time to fight back against a breeze on a long final. In fact, I’ve been able to hold it in place over the ground and do an elevator landing on a couple of occasions when I’ve underestimated the wind.
The Cub is a cute little airplane that looks great tooling around the pattern. The low power and older foam material, however, make the MiniMag a better choice if you’re looking for a small, high wing model.
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