Acro Busted!

Can you believe it? Last Wednesday was a great day here in Maryland, weather-wise. So a bunch of us went to the flying field. I flew the Acro for the first flight of the day. Started with a lot of confidence. The flight went pretty well. Except I did feel that I had a little too much tail weight. The engine ran out of fuel while the plane was high-about a 45 degree angle above level. I did not sense any particular difficulty with that. I was thinking about taking off some tail weight after landing. The plane slowed down a lot. It still had a lot of altitude. I started to dive a little to pick up some speed. And then a down draft caught the Acro and slammed it right down to the ground really hard and really fast. Caught me completely by surprise. The Acro was on the ground before I could react. Wicked downdraft! And of course there was a loud CRACK! And the fuselage broke in two pieces right behind the wing.
So I took some tail weight off the Acro and put the pieces in the bed of the pickup.
Now the Acro is under repair. I epoxied the pieces back together. And I am layering Carbon fiber strips and carbon fiber veil over the joint and far beyond the joint on either side. A little repainting and she should look O.K. Hopefully the repairs will be able to survive a lot of rough landings. But I would still like to be spared the shear winds and downdrafts that are so common at our field.
One of the other guys in the club also crashed while pulling out of an outside loop inverted. His plane ran into a downdraft at just the wrong time and hit the ground.