AMA Nats: FF Power
ANY FREE FLIGHT CONTEST is dependent upon three components-quality contestants, adequate siting, and acceptable weather. A Nationals contest, in particular, depends on a healthy representation of each of those three elements. It is safe to say that at this year's Lincoln Nats the contestants were there, both in quality and quantity, as over 850 FF event entries were tabulated-302 of them in Power. The second component, adequate siting, deserves some expanded commentary, however. From conversations with numerous contestants, the mental image of the Nats FF site that brought them to Lincoln was not borne out by what they found. Situated some 17 miles west and south of Lincoln, near the village of Denton, the site was on high ground overlooking rolling hills to the north and east.
Santos Dumont Peanut
IT WAS ALMOST an Old World version of the Wright Flyer. While not quite a match for the pioneering achievements of the American brothers' famous plane, this zippy little European biplane with the long, exotic name achieved a few records of its own, back in the first years of this century. On September 13, 1907, the Santos-Dumont 14-bis became the first heavier-than-air machine to make an "official" flight under its own power on the European continent, albeit with a negligible distance of seven meters. The following month, on October 23, 1906, the spunky biplane covered 60 meters, winning the Archdeacon prize for a flight of over 25 meters. But the coup that earned renown for the 14-bis and its builder, Santos-Dumont, came with a series of flights on November 12 of that year-of which the longest, at 220 meters, captured the Aero Club of France 1,500-franc prize for the first flight of 100 meters.
The Case for Scale Documentation
MY EXPERIENCES in the last decade as a competitor and judge in Free Flight, Control Line, and Radio Control Scale contests have given me the opinion that too few modelers give proper emphasis to a very important part of their overall competitive efforts: scale documentation. While spending literally hundreds, even thousands, of hours in the construction and detailing phases of an airplane, most modelers spend little effort in putting together the very standards by which their models will be judged-standards which the contestants should establish and provide for the judges in the form of good documentation.
Free Flight: Duration
CO2 POWER continues to gain in popularity if my mail is a barometer of reader activity. In particular, CO2 conversions of one type or another are mentioned frequently by correspondents. Some readers tell of modifying rubber-powered kits to accept CO2 motors, while others mention converting glow engines (up to .049 size) to CO2 power using either the Davis Conversion accessories or parts of their own manufacture. C. P. Chapman of Chicago relates that he has had excellent success converting both the MRC balsa-and-tissue Piper Cub and the MRC foam DeHavilland Puss Moth to CO2, needing to add only small incidence shims to the stabilizers to get good flights. C. P. also gives high marks to Sig's kits as conversion subjects.
1986 Nats: FF Indoor
SUSPENSE! After much difficulty in trying to secure an Indoor site appropriate for a National-caliber contest in (or near) Lake Charles, the Nats planners ended the on-again/off-again situation by opting for the Lake Charles Civic Center at the twelfth hour. The uncertainty of whether the huge Burton Coliseum or the Civic Center (a small, Category III site) would be the actual flying location most assuredly contributed to the almost total indifference to the events by potential Indoor entrants. To the credit of the Nats Planning Committee, they did try to secure the Coliseum up until the time when planned construction in the building made it impossible to pursue the matter further.
