Free Flight: Duration
BEEPER BELIEVER. The feeling is familiar to anyone who has ever flown Free Flight-a mixture of joy and panic as you realize that your model has just maxed out in a big thermal-and it's not coming down! That's what I was feeling when I got to the fence about a mile downwind at the annual Pensacola contest last June. About the time I started over the fence, Jim Bradley pedaled up on his all-terrain bicycle. Jim hopped off his bike, lifted it over the fence, climbed over, and pedaled off after his Nordic, which was in the same thermal as my Wakefield. Through all this, a small radio receiver in Jim's hand was putting out its static-clouded squawk.
Free Flight: Duration
FOAM plus aluminum: Last summer I had a chance to look at the experimental foam-and-aluminum wings being investigated by Florida Nordic fliers Dale Elder and Harry Grogan. Basically, the wing is of fairly typical D-box construction, except the D-box itself is solid foam instead of the usual sheet balsa and ribs. The foam is covered with the same very thin hard aluminum that is now standard for FAI Power plane construction. The wing panel I examined was incredibly stiff. The wing is built up of three subassemblies.
Free Flight: Duration
LAUNCHING: One day about a decade ago, a few grownups and kids were flying one of Frank Zaic's Flash X-12 designs in the front yard. In case you are not familiar with the X-12, it's a 12-in.-span, all-sheet-balsa stick Rubber model. Frank offered a good description of it and the slightly larger X-18 in the 1975 NFFS Symposium. Anyway, I noticed that one of the grown-ups was getting consistently higher climbs than the rest of us, and wondered why. Since I was doing all the winding, I knew that extra turns weren't the source of the extra height.
Free Flight Duration
PLEASE ALLOW me to introduce myself: I'm Louis Joyner, and I'll be writing the Duration column every other month, alternating with Harry Murphy. I'm 47 years old, and to be honest, I can't remember when I started with free flight. But I do recall teething on a Jim Walker 74 Fighter. The usual Comet and Monogram models followed. I built my first Wakefield at the age of eight, and who knows how many more since then. As a Junior and Senior I flew just about every free flight event, as well as some Indoor and control line. After getting back into free flight some 20 years ago, I dabbled with glider and power, but I have concentrated on Wakefield for the last few years.
Free Flight: Duration
THE BIG EVENT this month is, of course, the Free Flight World Championships at Lost Hills, California. Practice begins Monday, October 4, but I imagine that many of the teams will arrive the weekend before to warm up at the 15th California Invitational. Since this is being written in May, I don't have a full list of participating teams, but here are the ones that have returned provisional entry forms: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela.
