Free Flight: Duration
WITH ALMOST 250 contestants and dozens of events spread over five days, the Nats is hard to describe, let alone chronicle. What follows are some random observations. I hope that these, and the accompanying photographs, will at least give you some of the flavor of this annual event. AMA's International Aeromodeling Center in Muncie, Indiana, is no Lost Hills, but it certainly is a very good Category III site. And when the weather cooperates as it did this year, it is big enough for the three minute maxes needed in the larger FAI events (F1A Glider, F1B Wakefield, and F1C Power).
Free Flight: Duration
SERENA: That's the name of the new Coupe being imported by Sal Fruciano of Starline International. Like the Andre Burdov coupe that Starline has been importing for the last year or so, the Serena is available as a ready-to-fly model. Here's Sal's tale of how the new Coupe came to be: "Our new Coupe, now named Serena, is made in Ukraine by Alexie Bukin. He is a flying buddy of Stephan Stephanchuk. Alexie won the Anatov Cup for F1B this year. I met him in 1994 on our trip to Kiev.
Free Flight: Duration
TEAM SELECTION FINALS: The 1999 United States Team in F1A Glider is Brian Van Nest, Jim Parker, and Steve Spence; in F1B Wakefield, John Sessums, Bob Piserchio, and Vladi Andriukov; in F1C Power, Faust Parker, Ron McBurnett, and Ed Keck. The Finals to select the team to represent the United States at the 1999 World Championships in Israel were held September 16-19, 1998 in Palm Bay, Florida. The Finals are held every two years, alternating between the East and West Coast. The three events are F1A Nordic Glider, F1B Wakefield Rubber, and F1C Power.
Free Flight: Duration
MOTOR MAKEUP: When I first got started flying rubber-powered models, just about everybody used 1/4-inch-wide rubber strip. You'd check the plans for the suggested motor length and number of strands. You would next measure out however many feet of rubber that was, tie the ends together, and by trial-and-error, arrange this into a motor. Sometime in the early 1960s I switched to 1mm diameter Pirelli Lastex. A typical 50-gram Wakefield was 104 strands-well over 150 feet of spaghetti. I soon learned to make up motors by winding the rubber onto a sheet of thick balsa sheet cut to the required length. Then I'd slip it off and bind the ends of the motor with small rubber bands.
Free Flight: Duration
TIPS: The shape we give the wingtips of our Free Flight models is based a bit on aerodynamic theory, some on the practicalities of construction, and-perhaps more than we care to admit-on fashion. The tip of a wing, or any flying surface for that matter, is an aerodynamic special case. At the tip, the air is not flowing straight from front to rear, as it is over the rest of the wing. Instead, it is curling up from beneath the wingtip, rolling and wrapping itself into a spiraling vortex trailing off the tip. This vortex produces quite a bit of drag. (That is why wind-tunnel test airfoils extend the full width of the tunnel.) For generations, modelers, as well as designers of full-scale aircraft, have tried a number of things to reduce the size and effect of the tip vortex.
