SEN 1936

Table of Contents – SEN 1936

1. Captions for Tom’s Photos
2. The Rest of the Story
3. Profound Disappointment
4. E-36 and F1S at the Ike
5. SEN and Politics – Teddy Bear on a Bike

Tom Hutchison Free Flight Picture Gallery – Captions, please
Walt Ghio
f1bwalt@comcast.net

The notice that I had posted on this web site has generated a lot of interest in viewing the pictures. The site had just over 200 visitors before I had put the notice out. This evening it is over 800 visitors.

Peter Lloyd sent Joe Mekina an e-mail explaining that one of the pictures was of David Anderson launching Tony Cincotta’s Dragmaster which was proxy flown by Willy Von Kamp. This made me think that maybe the viewers would be willing in helping Joe and me to identifying the people in the pictures. A lot of the people in the pictures I know from my attendance at contest over the years, but not all the people in the pictures. My guess is that I can identify 60 percent of the people in the pictures. That leaves 40 percent that I need some help with.

If you are willing to help, just attach the picture to an e-mail addressed to me. My
E-mail address is listed at the top of this notice. If you are doing more than one picture just us the file name for the picture as a reference with the name or names of the people in the picture. It does not matter if I receive a photo with somebody that I can recognize. This will just confirm who is in the photo. I will take all the information that I can receive.

With time Joe will add the names / location to the pictures on the Tom Hutchison web page as we have on the FAI Power .com web page.

Thank you for any help that you can give us. Walt Ghio

Editorial section

Good News or Rather the Rest of the Story*
A few issues back some comment was make of proposed rule changes to the F1 AB and C classes. In particular there were a number of ideas proposed that were intended to curb performance at the top end for F1A models and they revolved around making the towline heaver or the flag bigger. A certain of degree of skepticism was expressed, in particular that these ideas would make it much worse for the normal flyer. It turns out that 2 well known F1A sportsmen who I believe are also on the CIAM FFTSC took on the task to try out these ideas. Both of these are very good flyers and one I would put in the illustrious top 5 F1A guys. While the results of the test have not been published it appears that the skeptics were right and then some with difficulties in handling the models and other unexpected issues. This very credible test caused the FFTSC to not support these ideas. Credit to the FFTSC for doing this work. Kudos to the flyers for making the effort to check out the proposals, pity the originators did not do that?! But all’s well that ends well. Unlike the Paul Harvey stories we are not revealing the names in the last line. It’s for someone else to tell that story.

* The Rest of the Story consisted of weekly radio stories presented by the American Radio host, Paul Harvey as little-known or forgotten facts on a variety of subjects with some key element of the story (usually the name of some well-known person) held back until the end.

Profound Disappointment
I saw one of the people checking out the E-36 prototypes before the rules were announced, I have watched quite a number of people in the USA flying E-36 and enjoying themselves and I have run E-36 events. I heard a well-known European sportsman who spends a lot of time in the USA say how good it would be to have this small field class back home, so he bought a number of kits and took them back only to be disappointed when the F1S class was withdrawn at the last minute a year ago. Hope appeared when it looked like a proposal would be made this year, unfortunately the proposal has an un-needed change to the model specs. This has given rise to an endless debate on FB and similar places, a real “dialogue des sourds” as one would say in French. If one looks at F1Q, this is case of failing to learn from history. At this point in the life of our sport we cannot change rules just for the sake of changing or argue just because we like arguing, flying is the objective.
We have received some materiel around this subject from the author of this year’s F1S proposal and other sources. Our disappointment in the situation is such that we are doing something that we have only done 3 times before in almost 2000 issues of SEN and are exercising our editorial discretion and declining to publish these pieces.

Since we wrote this, warring parties declared a truce on FB and it remains to be seen if it can be straightened out by the CIAM meeting in April

E-36 and “F1S” at the Ike
The above mentioned discussion has given rise to some confusion about E-36 at the Ike in Feb. The full flyers for the event will be available in a day or so here and are already other places. But as in 2014 Don Deloach and friends are sponsoring the E-36 World Challenge. This is a regular AMA E-36 event and a one flight to the ground with generous prizes. Full rules in said flyer. On the Sunday with the FAI mini events we are running a pseudo F1S event. This event is for AMA E-36 spec airplanes flown in rounds with the FAI mini-events. !0 second motor run in the regular rounds and 5 seconds in the flyoffs. Again full rules in the flyer. Note this is different from the controversial proposal mentioned above that had a slightly different airplane spec from E-36. At the present there are no Official F1S rules so we are doing what we think best.

SEN and Politics
In SEN we have an editorial policy to keep away from non modelling related politics, both national and International and focus on flying. We find it encouraging that people of all different points of view can get together and enjoy themselves on the flying field. I mention this because from time to time I make reference to a well-known personality and this can be mis-interpreted as a particular non-modelling point of view. A while back I quoted from US president, Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech back in the early 1900s to illustrate that the person who really understands the competition is the person that does it and not those on the sidelines. I got some private mail commenting on this from both sides of a non-modelling political point of view. I decided at the time next I drew upon the words of a public figure I needed to finds someone from the other side of the political spectrum. Unfortunately I could not find an appropriate quote from Che Guevara or the like on F1A or FFTSC in the article above so had to resort to Paul Harvey. No non-modelling politics intended.

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