A buddy of mine shot weddings with a pair of F-1s for close to twenty years and his story sounds a lot like yours. He had one slide off a pew onto a tile floor and the only damage was a dented filter ring on the lens. The body never even hiccuped. Thing is, he sent it in for a checkup the next year and the tech found the same stuff you did, dried up foam and speeds drifting slow. So the crash test is real, those bodies are tanks. I just wonder if the drop shook something loose inside that you will not notice until a roll comes back weird.

Man, that Baytown story is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear more about. What were you actually looking at from the seat that day, like were you going off the boom angle indicator or just plain feel for the radius? I ask because I'm trying to figure out if your miss was a radius problem or a boom flex and load swing problem, since those are two totally different failures. Because if it was radius, then yeah, walking the chart every time makes sense, but if it was something like outrigger sink or the load drifting on you, the chart wouldn't have saved you either. What did you change on the chart side, just the radius or did you start adding in the swing and setup stuff too?