We found out in January 2007 that the Blue Angels were coming to town in July '07. My son thought it would be cool if I built one, and that was all the convincing I needed. I had already put together a list of plans from parkjets.com that I'd like to build, and the F-18 (designed by Steve Schumate) was on that list. The build was both long and short--it took around 15 hours of work to build the plane, but I spread the build process out over two months. Assembly was very straight-forward, thanks to Steve's detailed, photo illustrated construction guide.
Here I am just after painting the finished model

Here's a video of the Blue Angel's first flight in July 2007.

The batteries I was intending to use in the plane were with the vendor for testing and replacement at the time of the first flight, so I had to substitute some smaller batteries that I had. The batteries were unable to produce the current needed by the motor at full throttle, and the lack of power is evident in the video. At least it will be when you compare the 130 Watts of power in the 'Maiden Flight' video to an updated video when the plane has 180 Watts of electrical power on hand.

I crashed it today (November 11, 2007). There was a problem with the speed control; it kept cutting out, and I shouldn't have flown to begin with. Struggling with resetting the speed control in flight, I set it down hard, out of sight in a gravel parking lot. The damage wasn't too severe, and I had the plane flying again 2 hours later.