I am not aware of any in-flight structural failures in a Prescott pusher. I do know the airframe was welded square steel tubing and, according to Tom (Prescott) a lot of structural analysis went into the design. A large scale RC model was built and was completely instrumented to obtain in-flight data.
All that said, all of Tom's designs needed nose ballast to get the CG into range and, particulalry the Pusher, was very short coupled. Tom claimed it was managable with pilot training. I never got to fly in one as the company was long gone when I worked with him and he didn't own one at the time. Some years later while living near Aan Antonio, TX, he had obtained two complete airframes and was trying to develop them as drones for long mission, offshore weather data collection. I don't think that endeavor went anywhere and have always wondered what happended to the two aircraft.
In the late 90's, he designed two pusher configuration RC models that were built in my shop while we were working for Aero Union, a company flying multi-engine forest fire fighting aircraft based in Chico, CA. Yes, both RC models had a lot of nose ballast.
It would seem the turbine conversion would be a good answer to some of the CG and climb rate problems the original design had. The fuel burn would be the only downside.
Tom was definately a salesman first and always had some project looking for investors. His biggest disappointment was the loss of control of the Precsott Pusher aircraft company and the subsequant loss of all the original tooling and tech support. He spent an lot of time trying to put the company back together without much success. I last saw him in the 90's in Texas with the drone project and would get a call every few years about the latest, "investable," project he was working on.
Vince Homer
