Nats Radio Control: Soaring
WIND, rain, and cold! That's the way Walt Good described the weather for the soaring event at the A.M.A. Nationals. As a matter of fact the week should have been renamed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wind, Rain, and Cold. Held at the Springfield municipal airport, an excellent site, the events included two-minute precision, ten-minute duration, and, as an unofficial event, Scale. On Thursday the 20-to 30-mph wind met the 79 entrants head on. And, if the wind wasn't enough of a challenge, the visibility-or lack of it-was. Using two lines of 300 meters many modelers and timers had a difficult time of determining just when lines were released from their models.
7th Soaring Nationals
THE RACE will be talked about for years! Most have praised the event while others are still wondering why they allowed themselves such an endurance test. Conceived last winter as an event to: 1) add a new dimension to the R/C Soaring Nationals, 2) provide a task for club/team competition, and 3) tie in with the 1976 Bicentennial theme; the race accomplished all that and more. The basic rules were simple: one team per AMA club. The object: to fly a cross-country course of 76 kilometers (47.2 miles) with the same ship. Land as many times as necessary but provide your own launch equipment. The lowest total elapsed time would determine the winner.
1976 LSF Tournament
In one of the most tightly fought sailplane contests ever held, Don Edberg outscored Neil Nolte 4852 to 4851 in the seventh annual LSF Tournament. The highest attainable score was 5000 points and only 177 points separated the 15th place finisher from the first! Earlier this year the annual North-South meet-a California affair-revolutionized thermal competition with a man-on-man concept (see Model Aviation, July 1976). Impressed with this idea, tournament contest director Kirby Parker decided to use this basic concept for the 1976 LSF contest.
Radio Control: Soaring
LEMON PAYNE, Skip Miller and Dale Nutter truly earned their way to the World Championships in 1977. Some details of their efforts are printed in the "Competition Newsletter" of this issue, but it is worthy to point out here that while Payne and Miller took the lead in round three of the five-round fly-offs, they had to earn their keep through rounds four and five. Meanwhile, Nutter was steadily scrambling his way through at least a dozen others that had a shot of at least third place.
Radio Control: Soaring
AS THE LINE in the song goes, "It was a very good year..." The kit manufacturers came up with new designs that were both a joy to build and to fly. If contests can be used as a barometer for soaring interests, then the record attendance at the major meets showed that the sport is still growing. New concepts in competition included man-on-man (one-on-one) events, variations of landing zones and point values. The Desert Dash and the Great Bicentennial Race stirred the imaginations of many clubs and a whole new event was born. The FAI eliminations lasted from May 1st to Labor Day and after over 2,000 flights by nearly 150 individuals the U.S.A. had its first team.
