Free Flight: Duration
NOMINATIONS are in order for NFFS Model of the Year Awards and Free Flight Hall of Fame Awards for 1982. Suddenly, it's next year already! Model of the Year awards are presented annually for outstanding models with a good track record in competition, but the award can be given for models that don't meet that criterion, as well as non-models. For example, Fulton Hungerford's tiny Ford Trimotor got an award, although it could barely fly across the room; nevertheless, it was an outstanding example of a way-out facet of Free Flight technology. The Old-Timer, Peanut Scale, and Pennyplane events were the subjects of awards, as have been the Seelig timer, and the Rossi engine. Send your nominations to Gil Graunke, 15260 Heather Hill Dr., Brookfield, WI 53005.
Free Flight: Duration
FF NATS NEWS. Now that Lakehurst, NJ as a Nats site, is down the tube, and Lincoln, NE has been selected, a big effort is going on to have the Outdoor FF action take place closer to Lincoln rather than at somewhere in the great beyond-such as Mead-according to usually reliable sources and my personal FFCIA. The local FFers, upon which all depends-it's Nature's way-have their corporate eyes on three or four sites, one of which is a 1.5-mile square (that counts as 36 squares Out West, I think) of pasture land, close to Lincoln. The intent is to have a unified Nats, if indeed such a thing is desirable, possible, or has really ever occurred before. Indoor events would be in the Lincoln Colosseum (with a second quasi-Nats at West Baden? . . . or would Lincoln be the more quasi of the two?). If all else fails, Outdoor FF would be at Wright Field, with Indoor at WB. By now you probably know all of this. But it would surely be nice to scoop Competition Newsletter on something, sometime!
Free Flight: Duration
TRIPPER STRIPS. Moe Whittemore, writing in the CIA Informer (that's Central Indiana Aeromodellers, folks) presents some interesting results of tests of tripper strips applied to an Indoor Hand-Launch Glider (Trippers are described in Bruce Carmichael's paper in the 1978 NFFS Symposium report, and I recall Hank Cole using them several decades ago.) Moe's trippers look like this: The trippers are 3.5 percent of the chord in width and .012 to .015 in. high. The centers of the five strips are located at the following distances from the leading edge (expressed as percentage of the chord): 28.5, 41.8, 53.8, 65.3, and 77.8. Moe made test glides of the glider with and without the trippers, obtaining the following results, averaged over 13 flights: Without Trippers, With Trippers Sink rate, ft./sec., 1.19, 1.09 Glide speed, ft./sec., 8.56, 9.62 Glide slope, 1 : 7.095, 1 : 8.595 Lift coefficient, 0.896, 0.789
Free Flight: Duration
JAPANESE INDOOR KITS introduced to U.S. A company called Two Worlds (Contact: Jimmy Walker, P.O. Box 449, Novato, CA 94948, phone (415) 897-6789) is importing a line of about a dozen Indoor-model kits from Japan. Models range in size and sophistication from a lightweight AMA Racer sort of thing to Pennyplanes and microfilm-covered models, with a neat little Ornithopter somewhere in the middle.
U.S. Free Flight Championships
NESTLED in the southernmost corner of California's San Joaquin Valley, where the Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada meet in the Tehachapi Mountains dividing California into its Southern and Northern parts, lies Taft, again the site of the annual U.S. Free Flight Championships. Held annually, over the three-day Memorial Day weekend, the Champs draws some 300 competitors, mostly from the western U.S., a few from the East and Midwest, Canada, and Mexico, an occasional one from New Zealand or Australia, and as is becoming a tradition, one from England: Paul Masterman, co-editor of Free Flight News. What can a writer say about an event which is bound to be a replay of what happened last year, and the year before, with the same old guys doing the same old things?
