A Dream Becomes Reality
by Roth Heyes
Shawano and a new full-scale airplane
A new full-scale aerobatic airplane has been heard lately zooming overhead near Shawano, Wisconsin. The pilot is Dave Scott, who has been practicing for the 2011 contest season in the full-scale aerobatic airplane he recently finished building.
If the name looks familiar, Dave runs the 1st U.S. R/C Flight School. Although he has lived and operated his facility in Shawano for the past 25 years, he grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, attending EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) AirVenture with his father and dreaming of the day when he would become an aerobatic pilot and fly at the event.
Early interest and modeling
When Dave was young, he built rubber-powered free-flight (FF) models until he started flying radio control (RC) with his father at age nine. Dave’s goal was always to fly his models in a manner that mirrored the full-scale EAA airplanes he watched.
He idolized Bob Herendeen, who flew a Pitts Special biplane with style and precision. Dave even named all of the pilots in his models “Bob.”
He eventually became an instructor in his local RC club and taught the way he had learned—primarily through trial and error. After finishing school, Dave moved to Colorado to pursue a career as a draftsman, while continuing to fly and instruct RC.
Building a professional training program
As his skills improved and his reputation as a flier grew, people began to pay him to be their regular instructor. That compelled him to develop a better program of RC instruction.
Dave’s father and others convinced him to provide full-time, professional RC flight training, and in 1987 he returned to Wisconsin and founded the 1st U.S. R/C Flight School. He admits he made a lot of mistakes in the first few years, but he learned from them and continued to improve his programs.
Word spread about the school, and now most of Dave’s four- and five-day classes are booked a year in advance. Each summer approximately 70 students attend the flight-training school from across the U.S. and Canada. About three-quarters of the classes are aerobatic instruction and about one-quarter are primary instruction.
The difference between Dave’s school and other training programs is that he works to maximize every minute in the air through detailed flight planning and by teaching pilots to control what the model does instead of reacting to it. This way his students achieve success from the start and then spend the rest of the week honing their skills.
Dave has written several flight-training manuals that feature the techniques he developed while running the school. He also regularly writes training articles for model magazines.
Transition to full-scale aerobatics
The success of Dave’s school eventually made it possible for him to pursue his dream of obtaining a pilot’s license and becoming a full-scale aerobatics pilot. After earning his license in early 2002, Dave gained access to an Illinois flying club’s Super Decathlon and learned to perform aerobatics using many of the same training techniques he teaches.
In August 2002 Dave entered his first aerobatics contest and won the Sportsman category by three percentage points over 20 other pilots. He also received the trophy for garnering the highest percentage of points possible at the contest. Dave credits those results to the fact that models fly under the same aerodynamic rules as full-scale airplanes, allowing him to transfer much of what he already knew from models.
He won or placed in several more contests, but everything came to a halt when the older Decathlon he was renting was grounded. After three years without an airplane to fly, he bought a Pitts S-1S kit and spent the next two years building and modifying it to be competitive with the higher-performance monoplanes he would face.
He test-flew the new aircraft on September 25, 2010. Despite having to hold right stick to keep its wings level, the controls were beautifully balanced and the S-1S performed well. A fast idle setting caused the first landing attempt to come in too high, so Dave elected to go around. By widening the pattern—probably aided by carrying some power—he greased the second landing attempt right on the centerline.
Training, maneuvers, and spin work
Dave has worked out most of the bugs and logged more than 50 flights on his Pitts, practicing Cuban eights, hammerheads, humpty bumps, vertical rolls, torque rolls, snaps, and rolling turns. Under his coach’s supervision, he spent two days working on spins, including five-turn flat and accelerated spins, both upright and inverted.
The principal emphasis during spin instruction was mastering the Beggs emergency spin-recovery technique. Despite being an advanced RC pilot and having competed in full-scale aerobatics, Dave found the accelerated and inverted spins disorienting at first. It took several attempts before recovery became automatic for him.
Thanks to that training, Dave is comfortable spinning his Pitts in all attitudes and knows he can recover quickly if he becomes disoriented.
Support, community, and plans
Flying a Pitts has been Dave’s dream since he was a kid watching the Red Devils air show team and Bob Herendeen at Oshkosh AirVenture. As with most amateur airplane builders, he received much help along the way. Dave is the treasurer for International Aerobatic Club (IAC) Chapter 1, and he owes a great deal to IAC members, EAA tech counselors, and friends who helped his dream become reality.
Starting this spring, Dave will begin practicing again for competition. His goal is to compete in the five or six contests held throughout the Midwest and then attend the Nationals in Texas in September.
And all of this started with a father taking his son to air shows and getting him involved in aeromodelling. M/A
Roth Heyes [email protected]
Sources
- 1st U.S. R/C Flight School
(715) 524-2985 www.rcflightschool.com
- Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA)
(800) 564-6322 www.eaa.org
- International Aerobatic Club (IAC)
(920) 426-6574 www.iac.org
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
