Keith Rider R-4
FOR THOSE OF US who build and fly rubber-powered Scale model airplanes, few events are as much fun to fly in or to watch as the mass launch elimination event popularized by the Flying Aces Club chapters. Particularly thrilling for me are those contests featuring the race planes of the 1930s in colorful eyeball-to-eyeball matchups. FAC rules offer two such race categories for rubber-powered models, the Greve Trophy race and the Thompson Trophy race. Entries must be replicas of full-size ships that participated in, or were intended to participate in, the National Air Races of the 1930s.
The Focte-Wulf Stosser
FINALLY, with eyes straining, I could no longer see the Stosser. Almost directly overhead the circling speck that was my model had disappeared against a patch of blue in a sky that was dotted with light, puffy cumulus clouds. She was gone! The occasional flashes of sunlight off her silver finish came down no more. We were at the first Flying Aces Club Nats at the Johnsville Naval Air Development Center in Warminister, Pennsylvania. This gathering of rubber-scale types, probably the greatest in decades, filled the live, bouncy air with models of all kinds and transformed the scene into a scale buff's paradise. I had followed the Stosser as she wheeled in light drift, watching her climb higher and higher for 25 minutes. Now, searching an empty sky, a number of thoughts tumbled through my mind. Where would she come down? How do you chase 'em when they go straight up? How long, I wondered, would she fly?
