Safety Comes First
PROBABLY the most thankless job in your model club is that of editing the newsletter. I speak from experience, because I've been there. However, without an editor, you would be unable to receive that monthly publication that tells you what is going on in your club when you didn't make it to the last meeting. More importantly (I'm being selfish, now), those monthly newsletters give me (and other contributing editors of MA) the material for our monthly epistles. For starters this month, here are some short stories related to safety which I extracted from a variety of club newsletters. The person credited is either the writer of the piece or the newsletter editor.
Safety Comes First
SOME time ago, I talked about the importance of conducting preflight inspections of models. An incident that I witnessed just two days ago prompts me to mention this subject again. One of the local RC clubs held a Scale contest at a nearby full-scale aerodrome, and I served as one of the static judges. In order to start the flying portion of the contest as early as possible on Saturday, the static judging began on Friday afternoon. While I was scrutinizing someone's pride and joy for accuracy of outline, I heard an extremely loud crunch that was unmistakably the sound of a model ending its useful days by contact with terra firma. Looking up, I was treated to the sight of a wing lazily descending out of the blue. A postmortem discussion revealed that the owner (who shall be nameless), an experienced builder and flier, had brought a 1/4-scale Steen Skybolt powered by a Kawasaki engine to the contest for use as a flight judge's "warmer-upper." (For those not familiar with this term, it is common practice to have someone fly a model-which is not entered in the contest-before the first contestant's flight for the flight judges to "normalize" their scoring.)
Safety Comes First
WIND, revisited. In the August 1984 issue of Model Aviation, this column carried an article by Tom Bilheimer, editor of the Lehigh Valley RC Society newsletter, which was titled "Wind." As I had predicted, it sparked some letters from readers. In case you missed Tom's article, what it basically said was that wind, when blowing at a constant velocity (no gusts or turbulence), does not have any effect on the reactions of an aircraft in flight. To prove his point, Tom placed an imaginary RC pilot on an aircraft carrier that was moving downwind at the same velocity as the wind. In other words, the RC pilot would have the sensation that there was no wind.
Safety Comes First
INNATE? Are some modelers more accident-prone than others? Is it only the "careless jerks" in the modeling fraternity who are responsible for accidents? Two documents recently came to my attention that seem to say that there are both those that will and those that will not be likely to be the cause of an accident. In which category do you belong?
Safety Comes First
Some of the past's "favorite" Safety items; plus a few unexpected incidents in the RC Sailplane department. THIS issue of Model Aviation marks my fifth anniversary as the author of this Safety column. Five years at the typewriter may not be as impressive an achievement as was recently claimed by Ron Van Putte, who has been writing his RC Pattern Aerobatics column since the very first issue of this magazine (June 1975). However, when Bill Winter, then the editor of MA, first asked me (in 1979) to consider writing the Safety column, I did not expect that I would be able to keep it going for five long years. The reason that it is still here is solely due to you, the readers of the magazine, and the many who have taken the time and trouble to write and report about potential safety problems which you have experienced or witnessed.
