Pro Series Officially Dead...

[Thorvald]

Well all the Pro series are gone form the Horizon site and Blade helis.com has removed the "Pro" category...

Top heli now is the 450x.

Sad, I was looking forward to moving up in the Blade line.

[dexterous]

Originally Posted by Thorvald

Well all the Pro series are gone form the Horizon site and Blade helis.com has removed the "Pro" category...

Top heli now is the 450x.

Sad, I was looking forward to moving up in the Blade line.

WTF, the Pro series is gone form the site but the 130x is still there?

[Pitch-Itch]

HH is the weirdest company in the world. They come here and vaguely deny that the pro series is disco'd, then the pro series just disappears from the site.

How about some transparency?

You're basically training people to not believe anything you say.

[Bladecpnitro]

I hate that man, I would have really considered getting one. I believe they had as good a design as any other brand, I guess sales just didn't warrant keeping them.

Maybe they'll slowly bump the Blade CFX back up into the larger heli's.

[rcnorth]

Originally Posted by Thorvald

Well all the Pro series are gone form the Horizon site and Blade helis.com has removed the "Pro" category...

Top heli now is the 450x.

Sad, I was looking forward to moving up in the Blade line.

It is sad, I have a 550X & it's a great machine!

Top heli is now 360 CFX

[hemp]

My guess - we had a very transparent view into how things happened internally.

Quite likely they don't make those decisions quickly or efficiently. With big companies that aren't tightly top-down managed that can be a common problem. Word starts to trickle that a change is being considered, so downline product people start to make decisions (like, say, letting team pilots fly other helis, or not restocking 600X kits once they're gone, etc). Still no one has officially said it's ending, so they can't publicly say it's ending - there's just evidence that it might be, which they can't comment on since they don't know. Eventually someone at the top finally makes the decision and what remaining changes need to be made, are made.

I'm not saying that's what happened since I obviously don't know. But I can say that is very much how things went down at my current company with a product I work on, which has no relationship to the RC industry. The community started to see that things were changing long before anything had been decided internally.

[bobbygz]

One of the more knowledgeable guys at one of my hobby shops said something about the Pro line not being compatible in Europe?? The problem is, he's from Lithuania, I believe and I have a really hard time understanding him and am always saying, "What"? which I always feel rude about, since I'm constantly saying it so I didn't grill him on it. But from what I could decipher, he claimed the Pro line was temporarily suspended, but coming back when they had it sorted out. He did seem confident they were coming back............

[jadewarrior]

Originally Posted by rcnorth

It is sad, I have a 550X & it's a great machine!

Top heli is now 360 CFX

It is sad, especially for those of us, myself included, who took a $1000 risk on a questionable brand with a checkered past at the time. I love my 550X, as well. A HUGE company such as Horizon could have absorbed early losses but instead they wussed out way too soon and called it quits with the excellent Pro Series.

Now, their biggest heli...is a 360mm bladed 6S 450... Wow... Like that's a new thing after the size/concept has been around for years. It does look nice, though, but it's nothing special these days.

[hemp]

Originally Posted by jadewarrior

It does look nice, though, but it's nothing special these days.

It's special in that it comes BNF. They still have that particular market cornered, at least in the US.

[jadewarrior]

Originally Posted by hemp

It's special in that it comes BNF. They still have that particular market cornered, at least in the US.

BNF...not a big deal to me...

But, if you price components, the 360CFX is fairly priced. I will give Blade that. The plastic framed 450X with a 1/2 plastic head, plastic geared servos, no-name weak ESC/BEC and very crappy 440H motor was priced at the same $499 when it was introduced. For the same price, the 360CFX looks to be a much, much better heli. I like where Blade is going with this pricing strategy. In the micro game, the 180CFX is WAY better than the problematic 130X and it debuted at $30 less.

Perhaps this is another move along the lines of dumping the E-flite name into "serious" helis again in the future? Who knows, but keep it up Blade (J.H., B.J. and, possibly, S.P.). You're doing well with the smaller offerings lately.

[Diogenes]

Well I've got four 550x airframes, so I can fly my 550x for a while, after that I'll xfer the electronics. no biggie, buts it's a bummer at the same time

[Thorvald]

Guys dont forget that Tower Hobbies also did the same thing. They quietly dropped any Heli larger than a toy, they are owned by Horizons competitors.

So now both of the top U.S. distributors have dropped all large helis... See a trend here going back to the comments Cliff made on his podcast?

Certainly sounds like the lawyers won and they were both adverse to risk.

[jadewarrior]

Originally Posted by Thorvald

Certainly sounds like the lawyers won and they were both adverse to risk.

Why now? People have been injured and even killed in the US going back for decades. It's more likely happening because interest in traditional kit build pod-N-boom type helis is dying off. People want easy things like quads and small pre-built helis these days. "They" just talked about this in this week's podcast about so many heli retailers going out of business or cutting the heli portion.

[Thorvald]

You are also forgetting the Roman incident in New York. That caused huge waves in the industry and even outside of the industry. I'm in the life safety security business and even there we were affected by what happened (public area, large metro area, spinning Katana death machine as some people put it).

It was the graphic pictures that someone posted on to the Internet that really brought it home.
I really wish those had never been posted. However the fear of litigation for wrongful death by a product is huge.take a look at any motorized vehicle today like any ATV or JetSki and tell me how many warning labels you see all over it everywhere. Now take a look at a 700 sized helicopter and tell me how many warning labels you see on it. You can do the math.

All that being said I hope to God it's just mine and Cliff's tinfoil hatand the decisions were made for purely marketing reasons but he has inside connections to horizon that run pretty deep including blade helicopters and for him to make a statement like that makes me think he knew a fair bit.

I'd love to hear from thunder Tiger what was the reasons for Great Plains no longer distributing their product but I'm sure will never hear the real answer or one that will all believe. But you do bring up a huge point that the market is so small it can't sustain all these manufacturers for a simple hobby.

[Uriah]

I don't think Roman's death had anything to do with the recent shake ups in our hobby. Every sport or hobby carries some type of risk; just go to the nearest horse stable for a good example. I think the last sentence in your post is a lot of the reason for what's going on... Relative to the number of enthusiasts, there's a disproportionate amount of companies in our hobby, and the markets are simply correcting themselves.

Another thing to factor in is the way a lot of our hobby parts are produced. Savox makes Align servos. Servo King makes RJX and BK servos. The LiPo voltage checker I bought from Amain is the same as the one my buddy bought from HeliProz, except with a different name. Half the motors we buy are just re-branded. Half the batteries we buy are just re-branded... This will all eventually come to a head and implode, because a lot of these companies don't even design their products, let alone produce them. Some of these companies are just taking products the Chinese factories are already producing and just have them change the color and add a logo; sometimes they'll even (*gasp*) have the factory swap some of the plastic components for metal ones, just so they can say it's "specially designed." Every now and again you find an exception to the rule, with one such example being the ProModeler Servos; but because products like that aren't as crafty and cunning with their marketing, most people in our hobby don't even know they exist.

[jadewarrior]

Originally Posted by Thorvald

You are also forgetting the Roman incident in New York.

No, I am not. That's specifically why I mentioned that accidents had been happening all along. I especially remember Roman's mishap because it happened on the exact same day my 550X kit arrived in Sep '13. Can't forget that!

It was the graphic pictures that someone posted on to the Internet that really brought it home.

Definitely. That can never be unseen, either. It looked like Freddy Krueger and Jaws got drunk and went to town on his head at the same time. Yikes...

[Thorvald]

Sorry Jade, I see that you did mention that. My apologies.

[jadewarrior]

Originally Posted by Uriah

This will all eventually come to a head and implode, because a lot of these companies don't even design their products, let alone produce them.

That's why I'm surprised (well half-way surprised) Horizon/Blade dumped the Pro Series so quickly. They DO design their own stuff and they do very well. Their problems come later on from the bean counters who dictate things be built to a certain price point. Even with Blade (and E-flite's) somewhat shaky historical reputation, you'd think they would have stuck it out. Had they just pushed through the slump, I bet these helis would have become very popular and profitable down the road once people really actually saw how good they were. But, instead, they shut it all down before the helis even got any street presence. I've never even seen anyone else in person flying a larger Blade heli and I fly a lot with various groups of people. People have complimented me plenty of times on how well mine flies and some were flat out surprised because it was "just a Blade".

[Iskareot]

I could see them making a (I know) 500ISH class i.e. 520cfx... etc.. and really take a 500 to the extreme not that the 500x was bad.. but better servo design motor power and LOCKED IN TAIL... repeating locked in trouble free tail. WITH A GOOD CANOPY...

SO like actually make a really good BNF 500 class heli. I ordered the 360 - if its as good as the 450x was then that will be a solid buy for the money for sure. Shit the canopy alone was a major improvement.

I love the 300cfx, the 180cfx.. so as its going so far so good with the (re do).

One more big size and that would be decent.

[jadewarrior]

Somebody before brought up an interesting point about Horizon possibly not letting Blade develop a heli larger than an "450" even though the 360CFX is physically larger than a traditional 325mm bladed "450". If they're now going with blade size as classification (or close to it) then a "450" could be swinging 450mm blades which would be larger than the traditional "500" size swinging 425mm blades.

[Butthead] That would be cool. [/Butthead]