Just for the Fun of It: Plane Talk
ALL OF THE KING'S MEN hope to put Humpty Dumpty together again. I'm the victim of a benevolent Sting. I can see the jump-start cables. Taking away For Fun is as heinous as murder by axe. For every guy into all that high-tech "in" stuff, there is one or more who want no-pressure enjoyment. Roses to smell are hard to find. Just For the Fun of It began in carefree innocence, but it grew to such awesome proportions that the author became the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. In the future we plan to talk about reader-built fun craft, with nice pictures, your data, and appropriate commentary on "feeling good" stuff. Obviously, we have to wait until you proud builders resume sending in those great pictures of your fun airplanes with enough info for us to describe them (freewheeling comments, please). You had no trouble with that before, by gosh.
Just for the Fun of It: Plane Talk
WHY THE 1/4-SCALE ARISTOCRAT? Another impulse! There is always one plane that is never to be forgotten. I always dream of planes to build, but they remain fantasies. But I build things I never thought about. The subconscious? I always wanted one big one. Buried in some pigeon hole of my mind was a dimmed memory of a long-ago 9-ft. rubber-powered Cessna (1920s), the prop carved from a 24-in.-long balsa 2 × 4. It took two of us to manhandle it to one row of knots of sliced inner tube rubber-no winder and no stretching. Tissue-covered, the Cessna skimmed aloft, never above 6 ft., a slow-motion Jumbo-Jumbo, only to land gloriously in a blackberry patch. One flight-but Lindy was happy with one flight. When the Aristocrat flew "off the board," it was as if a desk-bound environmentalist went back-packing to see bees and bears and came upon the "Lost Ark." That airplane is more indelible now than the first model I got to fly, my solo in a J-3, or any magazine I ever edited.
Just for the Fun of It: Plane Talk
THEY SAY there is nothing certain but death and taxes. It's also certain that I never know what I am going to write about. My old manual typewriter, like a horse, seems to know where it is going. It presents a "readout" without guidance. Vibes tell me it probably intends to prance through letters. "Don't think," it admonishes. "You'll hurt yourself!" I think about irrelevant things. I see Jim Walker, the master showman, doing his RC lawn mower act-when all we had was one frequency. It could only happen in Brooklyn. Such innocent looking guys (who me?) with transmitters hidden behind their backs.
Just for the Fun of It: Plane Talk
YOU SAY you love nostalgia. I think of it as history, things that are past but not gone. Modeling is a continuum. My "nostalgic" things are mostly contributed by others. The what's-next beckons me. But it would be a sad loss if our yesterdays had no relationship to our tomorrows. The Wright Flyer is not nostalgic. It is awesome to see it in the National Air and Space Museum. Today's scientists respect the classic "systems approach" that produced it. Now, let's pick up with Paul Brown, who runs an industrial company in Hobart, IN. "I was only 17 1/2 years old at the Nats in 1930," Paul recalls. "There were only three or four people in this area interested in model aircraft, and I got my info from American Boy magazine.
Spoilers (With Power!?)
YOUR SENIOR FALCON is on the downwind leg of the landing pattern and you go to half-throttle cruise, turn onto the crosswind leg, then onto final, and arrive almost over the "fence" at 75-ft. altitude-still at cruise power. Can you get onto a short landing strip? Yes-if you have spoilers. Can you abort with the spoilers out? Easily. Can you land from anywhere, no matter how high, while far out? With ease, every time. This is not a theoretical article. Answers are won in the trenches. This is an unadorned report of a problem that, seemingly quickly answered, turned into an intriguing adventure that kept opening fascinating doors.
