FREE FLIGHT DURATION - 2001/01
COngrAtUlAtIOns! Junior team
member Austin Gunder of Red Lion PA won
F1J at the Junior World Championships, held
in August in the Czech Republic.
Austin maxed out, then maxed the fiveminute
flyoff round, besting the secondplace
finisher by almost two minutes.
In F1B, David Ellis of Guilford CT also
reached the flyoff, scoring 217 seconds—
only 22 seconds from first place.
Congratulations to the entire team for an
outstanding effort. Thanks also to team
manager George Batiuk, for all his hard
work in developing the Junior program.
Symposium 2000: Each year the National
Free Flight Society (NFFS) publishes a
collection of articles to promote and
encourage the investigation, discussion, and
documentation of technical and theoretical
aspects of Free Flight (FF).
The 2000 Symposium—the 34th edition—
delivers all that and more. The range of essays
in this issue would have been hard to imagine
when the first Symposium was produced
during Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
FF Duration
ON THE DIAGONAL: In the days before carbon fiber and other high-tech materials, building a stiff, warp-resistant wing was a challenge. You could use a sheet-balsa D-box or a completely sheeted wing, but the weight penalty was often more than you, or more accurately the model, could bear. For lightweight structures, the tissue covering offered some increase in torsional stiffness, until it went limp in the rain or on a humid morning. Multispar construction also helped by breaking the wing structure into many small panels.
FF Duration
ON STABS AND STABILITY: Free Right (FF) is a balancing act. The aptly named horizontal stabilizer (stab) is an important component of that balancing act. However, we often take the stab for granted, shimming it up or down to get the glide right and popping it up for dethermalizer (DT), but otherwise paying it little attention. Basically, the stab's job is to hold the wing at the angle that will give the best glide. That's the easy part. When the model is gliding along comfortably, all the stab has to do is
Free Flight: Duration
NEW materials, like any other change, bring new problems-and new possibilities. The technology of Free Flight wing construction is changing rapidly. It's hard to keep up with what's happening with composite construction, carbon fiber, Kevlar, and the other new materials and techniques. Of course, you can bury your head in the sand and keep building the way you have for the last 30 years. But before you do, take a look at some of the ways you can incorporate some of the new materials and techniques into the models you are building. You might be pleasantly surprised. Many of the new structural techniques are actually easier and quicker than conventional balsa-and-tissue structures. And the result will be a wing that's stronger, stiffer, and more warp resistant.
Free Flight: Duration
BEEPER BELIEVER. The feeling is familiar to anyone who has ever flown Free Flight-a mixture of joy and panic as you realize that your model has just maxed out in a big thermal-and it's not coming down! That's what I was feeling when I got to the fence about a mile downwind at the annual Pensacola contest last June. About the time I started over the fence, Jim Bradley pedaled up on his all-terrain bicycle. Jim hopped off his bike, lifted it over the fence, climbed over, and pedaled off after his Nordic, which was in the same thermal as my Wakefield. Through all this, a small radio receiver in Jim's hand was putting out its static-clouded squawk.
