RADIO CONTROL SLOPE SOARING
Dave Garwood, 5 Birch Ln., Scotia NY 12302 E-mail: [email protected]
SPRING SLOPE EVENTS
For you Slopin’ Safari types, two spring Slope Soaring events have been announced at the time of this writing, and you may want to plan a late-spring trip around one or both of them. These major events are held at inland sites, reminding us that the ocean is not the only place to fly slope.
The 2003 Midwest Slope Challenge (MWSC) runs May 15–18 at Wilson Lake in Lucas, Kansas. Wilson is a reservoir featuring a 100-mile shoreline with many hills and few trees, making one or another site flyable in many wind directions. This will be the 10th-anniversary edition of the longest-running Slope Race series in the country, this year expanding to four sanctioned days and scheduled to include three classes of racing and a Foamie Combat match. The MWSC web site is www.alltel.net/~mwsc. The contact person is Contest Director (CD) Loren Blinde: [email protected]. See the R/C Soaring Digest web site for a report on MWSC 2002 at www.b2streamlines.com/MWSC2002.pdf.
The 2003 Southern California PSS (Power Scale Soaring) Festival is set for May 24–25 at Cajon Summit, California. This is the place to see and be seen if you’re into high-level craftsmanship and extreme flying of PSS warbirds and slope jets. This megasite, overlooking Cajon Pass in the San Bernardino National Forest, gets its daily blast of wind from the high desert to the east of the site. As the desert heats up, it pulls wind through the pass and right up the slope. The wind turns on here by noon almost every day. The Cajon Summit event web site is http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/slope_scale. The contact person is CD Brian Laird: [email protected]. The R/C Soaring Digest web site has a report on Cajon 2002 at www.b2streamlines.com/CajonPSS.pdf.
Slope Scale Models
I first saw a Scale A6M5 Zero flown at the World Soaring Jamboree in 1994, and when I got home I decided that I had to have one. Unfortunately, I developed epoxy allergies and can't work with the stuff anymore.
Have you tried to order a Wade Kloos big EPP Mustang, a Bob Dodson Pixie, a Joe Galletti Foameron, a Greg Goris A-10 Warthog, a Charlie Richardson Renegade, a Ken Stuhr Xica, or even a Mike Pratt Samurai from Sig Manufacturing? These airplanes were all worth having, and all are no longer made.
Online Resources
The RC Soaring Exchange (RCSE), provided by Air Age Publishing (publisher of Model Airplane News), is a discussion base that receives 30–50 messages each day to an international list of approximately 1,000 subscribers. The list moderator is well-known Eastern Soaring League stalwart and F3B pilot Mike Lachowski ([email protected]), with his coworker Lex Mierop ([email protected]).
You can view RCSE archives at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/soaring. If you want to subscribe, send an e-mail to [email protected] with "subscribe" on the first line and "end" on the next line in the body of the message. Make sure you turn off HTML formatting and send the message in plain text only.
Following are some useful web sites, including the RCSD event-coverage articles, more information for Slope Scale airplanes, and spring-event contact info:
- R/C Soaring Digest
www.b2streamlines.com/RCSD.html
- Randy Carr’s megasite for all types of soaring
www.faltion.com/sailplane/sailplanes.html
- NorCal-flavor slope soaring — Rob Crockett’s site
www.ncws.com/rcrock/index.html
- SoCal-flavor slope soaring — Bob Bingham’s site
- Midwest-flavor slope soaring — Greg Smith’s site (now hosting Slope Trash Magazine)
- Down East Maine-flavor slope soaring — Dave’s Motorless Flight Site
http://home.adelphia.net/~glidertime Note the slope soarer kit recommendations rated by pilot experience level at: http://home.adelphia.net/~glidertime/slope_sailplanes_typically_are_m.htm
- Slope Scale Airplanes — Cavazos Sailplane Design
Cavazos Sailplane Design 12901 Foreman Ave. Moreno Valley, CA 92553 (909) 485-0674 [email protected] www.rcglider.com
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
