AMA Nats: FF Outdoor Glider
SPREAD OUT over the week, the Glider events appeared to have every chance of enjoying at least one decent day for flying. Except the best day was Wednesday, and as fate (and random scheduling) would have it, no Glider events were scheduled then. Beset with rain and shifting winds on Tuesday, A-1 was flown intermittently between showers in the morning with more than one chaser finding himself in need of shelter midway through a retrieve. The technique seemed to be to watch as far upwind as possible in order to pick what looked to be a pocket of rising air coming downwind fast, get the plane up quickly, and pop it off the line. There was very little opportunity for kiting the ships into lift or circle towing. A-1 Towline was a bit like Hand-Launch Glider: Pick your air and get up in it before it gets away.
AMA Nats: FF Outdoor Rubber
COMPETITION at the Lincoln Nats was highlighted by the entry of 16 Wakefield fliers, among them finalists and semifinalists from the U.S. World Championships team selection process in prior years. Flying by rounds, 14 of the 16 made official flights on what turned out to be the best flying day of the week-long schedule, Wednesday. Jim O'Reilly had something to prove in Wakefield, and he did so in fine fashion. Although Jim had won Wakefield at previous National Contests, he had done so under weather conditions that either abbreviated the max times or necessitated modified rounds to prevent loss of models. This time everything was copacetic, and jim posted 1,250 seconds to best second-placer Bill Gibbons by a full 72. The next three finishers, Marty Richardson, Chris Matsuno, and Carl Perkins, were all bunched within 51 seconds of Gibbons in what turned out to be a good shoving match.
AMA Nats: FF Power
ANY FREE FLIGHT CONTEST is dependent upon three components-quality contestants, adequate siting, and acceptable weather. A Nationals contest, in particular, depends on a healthy representation of each of those three elements. It is safe to say that at this year's Lincoln Nats the contestants were there, both in quality and quantity, as over 850 FF event entries were tabulated-302 of them in Power. The second component, adequate siting, deserves some expanded commentary, however. From conversations with numerous contestants, the mental image of the Nats FF site that brought them to Lincoln was not borne out by what they found. Situated some 17 miles west and south of Lincoln, near the village of Denton, the site was on high ground overlooking rolling hills to the north and east.
Santos Dumont Peanut
IT WAS ALMOST an Old World version of the Wright Flyer. While not quite a match for the pioneering achievements of the American brothers' famous plane, this zippy little European biplane with the long, exotic name achieved a few records of its own, back in the first years of this century. On September 13, 1907, the Santos-Dumont 14-bis became the first heavier-than-air machine to make an "official" flight under its own power on the European continent, albeit with a negligible distance of seven meters. The following month, on October 23, 1906, the spunky biplane covered 60 meters, winning the Archdeacon prize for a flight of over 25 meters. But the coup that earned renown for the 14-bis and its builder, Santos-Dumont, came with a series of flights on November 12 of that year-of which the longest, at 220 meters, captured the Aero Club of France 1,500-franc prize for the first flight of 100 meters.
The Case for Scale Documentation
MY EXPERIENCES in the last decade as a competitor and judge in Free Flight, Control Line, and Radio Control Scale contests have given me the opinion that too few modelers give proper emphasis to a very important part of their overall competitive efforts: scale documentation. While spending literally hundreds, even thousands, of hours in the construction and detailing phases of an airplane, most modelers spend little effort in putting together the very standards by which their models will be judged-standards which the contestants should establish and provide for the judges in the form of good documentation.
