So I felt like a complete idiot last night when I replaced a servo in my TechOne Venus and wanted to take a quick late evening flight. I plugged everything in as it had been before and didn't check the direction of my servo travel. Just assuming everything would be the same, I handlaunched and quickly discovered that right was left and left was right! Of course even after being an experienced pilot this is something that you never really get used to because you are always caught off guard when this happens! Regardless, I was able to do a nose end landing which didn't really break any structure of my plane, but now I have a grinding brushless motor that I have either bent something or some of the magnets have come lose.
I wanted to share this experience with everyone to reiterate the point that you ALWAYS should check your control surfaces before you take to flight. Even if you haven't changed anything, your radio may have had the wrong button accidentally pushed or some other crazy chain of events may have taken place. Checking your control surfaces always ensures that you visually can see that the movement of the control surfaces are as they should be. Including this in your mental preflight checklist is a great way to ensure you won't have any surprises in the first few seconds and maybe the last few seconds of your flight!
Never assume anything when you change out parts. It didn't occur to me that changing out my servo, even though it was a different brand servo, would cause the travel to be the exact opposite of the stock servo. On the DX8 you simply go into your system setup menu by pressing the scroll button when powering on the radio. Then you navigate to servo setup and from there you can select which servo you want to adjust and then either leave the travel as normal or set it to reversed.
Also, you want to make sure your servos are always setup with everything centered. Check out our post here about centering your servos and making sure the control surfaces are zeroed out.
Also, check out the video from Flitetest on checking your control surfaces:
