Radio Control: Aerobatics
FIRST UP this month is a short report by Dianne Kristensen on the inaugural International Air Meet, which was held in conjunction with Japan's 10th Annual Aero Pageant, November 2-3, 1996. Dianne's husband Ivan was one of 10 top world-class competitors invited to participate. The others were Yoichiro Akiba, Hajime Hatta, Roland Matt, Wolfgang Matt, Giichi Naruke, Hanno Prettner, Dave von Linsowe, Quique Somenzini, and Christophe Paysant Le Roux. Prettner and Somenzini were unable to attend, but the remaining field was a stellar assembly by any estimation.
Radio Control: Aerobatics
I WAS ONCE ASSURED by a kindly teacher (after the semi-disastrous outcome of a botched chem-lab experiment) that making mistakes was part of being a productive human being. The important thing, he told me, was to make the proper correction and move on. That was many years ago, but to my chagrin, I still find myself regularly producing prima facie evidence of my humanity. Which, of course, means that the proper corrections must follow ASAP, as below. The February column contained this less-than-sterling example of differential control surface travel: "If the clevis attachment-point is in front of the hinge line, with the pushrod below the surface, the result will be more `up' travel than `down,' with the converse being true for attachment-points aligned aft of the hinge line."
Radio Control: Aerobatics
THE PURSUIT of aerobatic perfection (in model scale, at least), is filled with adjustments. The earliest radio control adjustments (aside from the radio innards, which required more-or-less constant adjustment just to work) were borrowed from Free Flight and Control Line. These were items like simple shims and bendable trim tabs, but things didn't stay that simple for long. Early on, the list of adjustable items rapidly encompassed everything in the spectrum of control; cable ends, control horns, clevises, and ball-links. Thankfully, radios became much less adjustable (as reliability increased dramatically) for a time, but then sprouted various tweakable electronic bells and tunable whistles in profusion. This process continues to the present day, where each new computerized joy-box introduced boasts at least one more adjustable doodad than its predecessor.
Radio Control: Aerobatics
WHEN I FIRST became involved in Pattern, "How to trim a Pattern model" was the favorite topic of the Aerobatics columnists. Computerized radio mixing had yet to arrive, and the complicated, convoluted prescriptions confidently offered up involved a lot of shimming, bending, cutting, twisting, heating, epoxying, glassing, re-epoxying, reglassing, and so on. Trimming cookbooks and charts filled with data about what and how much to do to what component were produced and reverently handed around like ancient scrolls (come to think of it, some may have been ancient scrolls!). Some of these charts are still in use today, and are occasionally still useful.
Radio Control: Aerobatics
PREPARATION HAS BEEN the cornerstone of success in all forms of human competition for roughly as long as that competition has existed. I have no way to prove this statement, but I'm willing to bet the farm (and the horse) that it is gospel. In fact, the concept of preparing for action may be as old as mankind. I would imagine that some of our distant ancestors spent the before the big hunt squatting by the fire, chipping new edges on the old flint points, and checking every shaft and binding two or three times.
