(feel free to skip if you just wanna fly the plane ;D )

Just wanted to start off by saying that I've been playing this game for a looooong o'l time now (almost 4.5 years) and in that time I've seen a lot of really awesome people come and go, and i mean a whole lot.
For those of you that don't know, I'm in my senior year of high school this year and looking back on my first days on simple planes it made me realize how much has changed, in Me, in the game, and in the game's users.
When I started out on this game, i remember it had just come out on the Amazon app store but my mom wouldn't let me get it because it was 5 dollars and she rarely let us spend any money on video games, so i remember one day being overjoyed at the sight of a sale going on for simple planes that lowered the price to just one dollar, which my mother allowed.
And so i spent the next 20 or so days making planes, testing them out, strapping obscene amounts of jet engines onto them and hoping they would fly. Now one thing to remember, back in those days, simple planes was just a shell compared to what it is today. All we had to work with was blocks, curved blocks, fuel blocks, wings, structural wings, fixed landing gear, retractable landing gear, two jet engines a big one and a small one, and 2 prop engines (one of which isn't even in the game anymore), along with a few other parts. We didn't have any fuselage, no hinge rotater, no re-sizable landing gear, no lights, no gyroscope, (not to mention the complete lack of mods) but i loved it, and it has been my favorite game ever since that first day.
When i was looking over my profile i just got overwhelmed by nostalgia, not just at my creations, but everything my old friends made, as well as everything that has changed.
I remember back when i first made my account (which was about 2 months after i got the game) the highest upvoted post (or at that time the most stared as we had a 1-5 star rating system back then) had about 55 likes, and that was a Millennium Falcon made by @Wakescar https://www.simpleplanes.com/a/Aq0s0o/Millennium-Falcon
And that post held the #1 position for months, and i started wondering if it was ever going to be passed, until it eventually was (I don't remember what by unfortunately).
And right about at that time we started getting hit with some AMAZING updates (thx devs ;D). The one i remember most was the addition of fuselage, which made everything 10 times easier make, and shape. Then the "weapons update" came which added guns, rockets bombs, and a bunch of stuff like that.
but unfortunately, that's when a whole lot of really awesome people started leaving the game.
A few come to mind, especially @ElijtheGeat and @Hypnotoad

@ElijtheGeat was one of the best on the site for a very long time, and although he did pop up every once in a wile, he has remained inactive for about 3.5 years. He was really one of my favorite creators on the site, and he surprised everyone with every post, taking things just a bit further every time.

@Hypnotoad is probably one of the saddest and most mysterious to leave the site. He had the most points of anyone on the site for months eventually becoming the first person to reach Platinum. He was such a cool person. I would always find him upvoting and commenting on really small creators planes giving them advise and just generally being a real bro to everyone. He has been inactive for 4.3 years.

@Wakescar was one of the first users making really amazing things, i mentioned his Millennium Falcon earlier, but he also made so many other things, like, to my knowledge, he made the first actually functioning walker, and a whole ton of other really amazing builds for his time.
He's been inactive for 2 years
then there was a guy called @CODENAMEBOB who was always memeing things n makin people laugh. He has been inactive for about 2.2 years

Next was a guy called @CanofBeans all i remember about him was he made a functioning ARC-170 fighter before i did and i got a little salty XD
He's been inactive for 1.7 years

Next a guy called @TanksOfOld i really have no idea what happened to him, but i haven't seen him for a loooong old time, which is pretty sad cuz he made some really good WW2 ish era things that i thought were really cool.

Next, @DeathFromAbove he always made really incredibly detailed stuff that looked SUPER good, especially for what we had to work with at the time. He has been inactive for 2.5 years

next, @HypnoticChicken he made a bunch of neat little random things and then a lot of the time, he would just bust out like 20 upvotes outa nowhere (which was a lot back then XD)

Next @Wormforce he wasn't active for long, but he built some o the coolest steampunk things of his time and most of them are still pretty solid designs to this day!

In short, I just really appreciate all the people that made this game so great!
It's really sad to see them go. I get it, people move on, but i just wanted them to know how much they where/are appreciated.

Anyways, thanks for sitting through my little monologue there, now onto the instructions and stuff for the plane.

So I really tried as hard as i could to make this as historically accurate as possible (since it's one of my favorite planes in the world), so it has a fairly accurate drag model, fairly accurate roll and pitch, top speed, all that kinda stuff, and in my opinion, rreeaaallly close to the actual plane!

===============INSTRUCTIONS===============

everything is normal except

VTOL = flaps