Family Flight Fest
by Don Slusarczyk
don@donsrc.com
The 2016 EAA Family Flight Fest was held March 11-13 at the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This was the first year I have attended, and all I can say is wow!
The contest was held inside the museum itself and the modelers set up around the airplanes in the museum’s hangar. My father and I had our tables set up at the front of a de Havilland Mosquito all weekend.
The format of the event is informal, with the day split up into two flying segments. During the daytime when the museum is open, the flying is mainly a Free Flight (FF) demonstration, with a short indoor RC demo at noon. Families can put together small balsa gliders and fly them in the hangar.
Saturday is probably the busiest day as far as the number of kids and gliders that are flying around in the air. I spent a lot of that time walking around with a bottle of Super Glue and accelerator, fixing gliders or gluing several together to make a multiwing glider, twin-tailed glider, or whatever the kids’ imaginations came up with!
When the museum closed at 5 p.m., the regular contest portion began and lasted until 10 p.m. I was pleasantly surprised to see how good the air was in the hangar. There was not a lot of drift once things settled down, but the open girder work could cause issues if your aircraft got too high, so height control was important.
This year, a new One-Design event was flown called the Mash Up. The model, designed by Rob Romash, has a 16-inch wingspan. The event rules are simple. The model has to be built to the outlines on the plans with a 2-gram minimum weight and 6-inch maximum propeller. The event was popular, and flight times for the model exceeded 5 minutes.
I managed to get the top time of 5:27, followed by Jim Buxton, who posted a 5:24, and Chuck Slusarczyk in third with a time of 5:22. There were only 5 seconds between first and third place! The plans for the Mash Up can be found on the Hip Pocket Aeronautics Builder’s Forum. I highly suggest this event for any local Indoor contest. The models are easy to build, sturdy, and fly well.
After the contest is finished, many of the out-of-town modelers stay at the nearby EAA Lodge, which is a short two-minute drive away. The night before the first day of the contest, Jim and Rob arrived at the lodge at approximately 9 p.m. and started building Double Whammys for the mass launch the next day.
The next night we watched old videos of past United States Indoor Championship (USIC) contests that Jim’s father had taken roughly 25 years ago. The late-night conversations and reminiscing went on into the early hours of the morning. It reminded me of the old USIC contests at East Tennessee State University when we stayed in the dormitory after flying each day.
I managed to sneak away from the flying during the day to explore the EAA AirVenture Museum. It has many unique aircraft on display. Some of the airplanes I have only seen in magazines since I was a kid, and to see them from only a few feet away made their existence tangible. I am looking forward to going next year.
If you have not gone to the EAA Family Flight Fest before, it really is worth the effort to attend. I want to thank H.G. Frautschy for his hard work in getting this contest organized and put together each year. He knows how to
make the modelers feel welcome and runs a great event!
West Baden Springs
The weekend after the EAA Family Flight Fest, a two-day contest was held in the atrium of the West Baden Springs Hotel in West Baden Springs, Indiana. Saturday was the first day of flying and it did not go well because the weather changed overnight from mid-
50° temperatures to snow falling in the morning, which caused some weird air. This, combined with the air-handling units being left on for part of the morning, made flying lightweight models practically impossible.
The bad air did not stop Mike Kirda’s 10-year-old son, Raymond, from logging in 88 flights for the day with his Denny Dart Mk II. Raymond had many followers as the day progressed. He is a true Indoor FF ambassador!
On Sunday morning, the sun was out early and the air became better as the day went on. Joshua Finn took advantage
of the good air and put up a 22:15 flight in F1R, setting a new AMA record, but that was short lived. Tom Sova posted a 23:45 flight to claim the new record.
I had been test-flying my F1R and put up an official flight of 24:32, which was short lived as well. Tom decided to fly again and with a well-tuned, variable-pitch propeller, put in a great 27:08 flight to claim the Category III F1R record. Bill Gowen also took advantage of the good air and flew his F1M to a new AMA record of 21:11, which actually exceeds the current F1M world record for Category III.
Congratulations to all who set records! See you all at the Indoor Nats in Rantoul, Illinois, on July 20-24!
SOURCES:
EAA Family Flight Fest
(920) 426-4815
www.eaa.org/en/eaa-museum/eaa-museum-events/eaa-family-flight-fest
West Baden Springs Hotel
www.frenchlick.com/hotels/westbaden
National Free Flight Society (NFFS)
www.freeflight.org
Hip Pocket Aeronautics Builder’s Forum
www.hippocketaeronautics.com
