Free Flight: Outdoor
THE 1975 NATIONALS turned out to be a dandy Free-Flight contest to the surprise of many who consider Lake Charles and Chennault AFB to be a poor site. The main reason for this success was the weather, which has been unusually good throughout the region this summer. Rarely did the wind exceed 10 mph even in gusts. Weather certainly played a part in separating winners from losers, but only in an interesting, challenging manner. Very few airplanes wandered off-base or were lost in the on-base swamps/woods. The number of contestants showed a healthy increase over last year and this served to relieve the rather depressing atmosphere I observed in 1974 at the Nationals, where entries were the lowest in my memory, which goes back to the 1950 Nats.
Nats Free Flight: Power
THE MAIN CONCERN of most free-flight contestants before the meet was the adequacy of the Springfield Airport. As it turned out our fears were unwarranted, since the field was a couple miles long in most wind-drift situations. There were some problems with cornfields on the airport, but all in all, there were few complaints about the main free-flight site. There was grumbling about the fact that some of the free-flight events were also scheduled a 30-minute drive away at Wright Field in Dayton. So, we would fly from early in the morning at Springfield until 4:00 in the evening when the base was re-opened to full-scale traffic, and then pack up and go to Wright to fly more events which did not require so much space-such as Scale, Payload, etc.-until 9:00.
Retracts For Stunt
LANDING GEARS have posed problems for aircraft designers from the beginning. The Wright brothers solved their problem by leaving most of the landing gear on the ground. Subsequent designers have yet to escape the fact that airplanes, to be useful, have to drag around 100 percent of the time something they use only 5 percent of the time. Since landing gears interface with the ground rather than the air, their shape and requirements have always been decidedly "unaerodynamic." That may account for the revulsion most designers feel for them. The process of building an aircraft emphasizes the dilemma. For example, we are breezing along. Hot Stuffing all our beautiful, light balsa and spruce pieces to each other, when suddenly we come to the realm of music wire, nuts, bolts, solder, plywood, etc. And then we have to use different glue, tools, and attach some heavy and ungainly landing gear to our sleek device.
8th Annual United States Free Flight Championships
MEMORIAL DAY weekend means Taft, California to us, and this past February we made our plans to go to our sixth USFFC. It is hard to believe there have been eight since we attended the first in 1971. The event has grown-this one was the largest-and deserves its AAAA status. In three days every free flight event in the galaxy is flown. Each event is managed by a club from the West Coast area, with a contest director and assistant (Joe Norcross and Jim Scarborough, respectively) to oversee it all. The result is a very spreadout arrangement with clusters of activity near each event headquarters. It is good that there is lots of room because Japan's entire 1975 production of trail bikes is assembled on the field for retrieval of models and, more importantly, so all the younger non-flying persons in attendance can spend their weekend trying to perfect the wheelie. This time, I took my new bike with me and, in the process of taking photos, testing and flying HLG, and chasing two night flights for the great Vic Cunnyngham, it accumulated 35 miles! Cars are not allowed for chasing.
