SEN 2335

 

1. USA F1C Team Factoid
2. When is USFFC?
3. Oregon Reminder
4. 2017 F1E World Cups in Martin, Slovakia
5. F1C timing
6. LAST MAN STANDING?

 

USA 2017 F1C Team Factoid
Was this the first USA F1C team to be comprised of PhDs ? And they did not even have to recruit Nobel Laureate David Wineland who is an AMA Gas flyer.  How about it Leeper,  the keeper of FF trivia?

When is USFFC?
From:Guy Menanno

Does anybody know the date on the United States Free Flight champs???

It is 22-24 Sept at Lost Hills

Link to flyer
http://www.lhffmaa.com/events%202017%20flyers/2017%20US%20FF%20schedule%20half%20page.pdf

Oregon Reminder
From: Mike Roberts

All
Two Americas Cup contest coming up September 8 Thru 10.  Bigs on 8 and 10 with minis on the 9th.  No swamps, excellent timers and no leach infested canals.  Don’ miss the always spectacular Willamette Valley weather and hospitality.  We hope we see you soon if not at the field then perhaps at one of the super local wineries.

Best Regards

Ron, Blake & Mike

2017 F1E World Cups in Martin, Slovakia
From:Jakub Drmla

Dear friends,

Please find the bulletin for 2017 F1E World Cups in Martin, Slovakia bellow.

Let me please know if you are interested to come. Looking forward to seeing
you.

Jakub Drmla
RC Model klub Martin
jdrmla@gmail.com
F1E_World cups2017.pdf

F1C timing
From: Antony Koerbin

Just some comments from a non power flyer timekeeper having read some suggestions about timing the bunt

Timing F1C motor runs is not something I enjoy but I always like to help out timekeeping in flyoffs so I do it.
It strikes me that as sound travels at about 360m/s you wont hear the motor cut until 1/3 second after it does assuming a height of around 120m. I havent heard this being discussed much before but maybe it has.

Its often impossible to hear the motor cut anyway as frequently its a mass launch and you cant hear the motor cut on the model you are timing with someone tuning up their engine a few feet away.
In this instance the burst of fuel coming out of the engine is maybe a better indicator. Its not the same as hearing the stop point but surely the equivalent and not very difficult to see. I cant imagine any burbling on with the rest of the fuel load ending up in the engine in a split second.
Maybe there is a dye that could go into the fuel to aid visibility.

Antony Koerbin

LAST MAN STANDING?     22nd August 2017
I am slightly ashamed to admit that I have only just found your website/forum. My great friend the late John O’Donnell was always telling me to look you up. He used to tell me that I might be pleasantly surprised by what I read. He was right, I have and I am.

It’s bitter sweet perhaps. The sweet being the fact that so many of you seem to be mourning the passing on the Builder of the Model Rule especially in the case of the FAI classes. The bitter and it’s quite a lot of bitter, is that sadly now it’s rather too late to change it back. Not to say that it isn’t too late to stop the idea encroaching across other classes in the USA. I had assumed, wrongly, that all you well heeled yanks would jump upon the idea of buying finished machines with enthusiasm. The reason you are forced so to do has been very well explained by the new member to your F1C team Eddie Carroll. I sense a feeling that many of you would rather it had not gone.

I am not sure of how far it has got into your domestic stuff – it’s right across the board here in the UK and has been for over 10 years. It was the BMFA’s adoption or rather rejection of the BoM rule that caused me to stop on 2006 or thereabouts. Believe me I didn’t want to. I will come to my reasoning later. What is quite clear, now we have had some years upon which to reflect the decision, the overall effect on numbers flying competitively has been a reduction certainly in the UK. No swarms of  new faces, held back until now by the problems of building, that we were promised.

Let’s not forget that it was only comparatively recently that you guys got the FAI bug. Back when I was starting out in the early 60s the USA was participating in the World Champs of course, we all remember Georg Reitch, Gerry Ritz, the great Doug Galbreath, (Steve Jones made some important points about his ethics)  Bob Cherny (Against who I flew in the ’65 event) and the Simpson brothers and so on.  However there was nothing like the FAI enthusiasm that many of you were to pick up once a few of you were exposed to some of the big and quite comparable European FAI events like Pierre Trebot, Eiffel Polkal and the Zell am See events in Austria in the 70s and 80s.

Your domestic concerns seem to currently centre on the detrimental effect it has had on F1C in particular. Everything has suffered – possibly power more than the other two classes – possible F1A hardly at all actually. It was a creeping and gradual thing the approach of which not enough of you recognised back in the early 80’s because the villain of the piece was not people or even ideas but  materials. (Not that I would ever suggest, as some did at the time, that these developments should have been banned. Perish the thought.) Kevlar and Carbon were a huge jump over GRP but like GRP  – mouldable. Indeed the only way they could be of use to us was for us to mould them. So we did. But moulds had to be made and cambered building boards and so on. Then ovens and vacuum pumps etc. for a proper job. All this tooling up!  Understandably many couldn’t be bothered with it and simply continued flying their Lanzo Sticks. (I use the Lanzo Stick as an illustration here of what I mean by traditional all balsa construction but it applies to much more modern craft as well of course just thought that I would nod my head politely in appreciation of possibly the most loved rubber model design of all time, that and his Duplex, particularly as they are all American!)

So with the tooling came the possibilities of faster production and after all the complexities of making moulds and so forth why not make multiple parts. Tubes, leading edge shells, fuselages, pylons etc. Hey – why not sell a few? Then almost finished fuselages and wing panels. Now these came too close to breaching the builder rule and with the FAI in the thrall of the newly emergent East European bloc nations they jumped. It was in my opinion a disastrous move. Part of the reasoning was definitely that they actually wanted positively to encourage these newly freed East Europeans and saw it as a sort of funding encouragement to allow them to sell stuff. We all fell for it I must say. It was lovely to be able to buy bits – really beautifully made bits and cheaply – that you wanted every time you popped across the channel for an international FAI event. The other part of the reasoning was that the FAI couldn’t actually see a way clear to writing a watertight rule let alone enforcing same so they simply dropped the BoM. One can appreciate their reasoning.

The effect was very gradual.  Nothing happened much for the first few years, the early 90s, apart from people feeling happier about buying ribs, bits of wing and fuselage etc. Complete prop assemblies and prop blades had been legal all along as had timers, engines, hooks pans etc. Its just that the businesses boomed amongst a small and highly motivated group led by the famous pioneer who now resides in your Country and who did very well on it. Many of you too would probably have done likewise had you had had strenuous state encouragement if not funding and access to weapon’s grade materials!

It wasn’t till about ’95 – 96 when it really took hold and I realised what it had unleashed. The legal purchase and use of complete finished and trimmed models! Oh dear who would have though that anyone would have wanted to do that? The rules had been loosened to allow complex components almost complete models as kits. What we got however was finished models often with back up repair and a re-trimming service. Coincidentally just at the same time as the Iron Curtain softened and Berlin Wall was punctured those East Europeans not actually manufacturing were keen and well off enough to cut all the corners and buy their way to instant high level performance.

I was flying F1B in the World Cup alongside the 1996 European Champs in  Maniago Northern Italy. I remember being horrified to see the Boznian/Hertsogovian team Wakefields all lined up in their jigs. They were Andrujkov models with no attempt to disguise the fact. My disgust being compounded by the fact that very recently we in the UK had been asked by a fervent supporter of, almost anything as long as it was East European, to contribute to a fund to get former Yugoslavian FAI flying back on its feet after their civil war that tore them apart. This is what they had spent the money on! Many others, it has to be said mostly below average flyers until then, followed suit immediately and over night instead of having to beat Alex which we could all do occasionally we had to beat a couple of dozen of them. No chance! Incidentally that was also the first comp at which we were treated to Fuzeeve’s first folder. What a delight to witness such engineering ingenuity little realising that in a year or so such things would be on the market and hence common place and for that reason actually rather dull. I am so glad I was there to applaud when the first wings ever un-folded at the top of a climb. A great moment.

I realised that although a competent builder and flyer to compete on the level with this I was going to have to buy complete models just as everyone else was doing. (Mr Carroll’s argument). Up until that time I had been motivated to build by the principal that I would arrive on the flying field with the best models I could possibly have within the rules. These were through my own efforts not someone else’s. They had to be. If I were beaten I would try to improve my models and my techniques. This was an on going process and a healthy and enjoyable one. There were some great engineers out there like Fuzeeve in F1C at this very comp but they could all be beaten occasionally.

However the view of a line of purchased, top of the range and identical Wakefields at Maniago stopped me in my tracks. I can to this day remember were I was standing and what I thought and how I had to decide right then what I was to do. Which path I was to follow. I had to decide whether to buy these and stay in a position where I could still say that I was equipped with the best models I could possibly have, or stop.  To continue with my own models would simple mean I was at a self inflicted disadvantage and I don’t compete like that. That is called making up the numbers. I don’t do that. I stopped. Two months later on 20th October 1996 I qualified for the GB team once again to tidy off the season. I immediately declined my place and packed away the F1Bs, shut the box and it has never been opened since. Twenty one years ago. I never flew F1B again.

Then proceeded a decade for me of flying in the UK in all the other events, (and a bit in Germany with Slow Open Power models – great fun) until our BMFA also threw out the rule. (A rule that incidentally had been rewritten and polished up in the advent of this so called ‘difficulty in policing’ much along the lines of your contributor to this site a little while ago namely Leo Reynder who had some good ideas about “connections between parts.”)  It had taken a team of us flyers including myself, Pete Watson and John O’Donnell a long time to come up with anything that good but it was all thrown away.  It is a tragedy, now compounded by the fact that so many of you as well as some of those influential in its removal in the UK now regret their decision. Sad thing is the genie is very much out of the lamp and there’s no way will it ever fit back.  Well only if you want a struggle similar to that of re-packing one of those very convenient folding camping chairs back into the string pull bag it came in!

I don’t think loosing the BoM has ruined F1A nearly as much as B&C as the A2 glider class has increasingly involved a great deal of physicality and pilot ability. Power and Rubber are just launched – hopefully straight and into lift. Lift picking skills being common to all three but still most challenging for the gliders.

Your current demons are the advent of RC DT. It’s just the thin end of the wedge believe me. Wonderful idea for trimming I would have it on everything but absolutely not for competition flights despite all the over blown humbug about the so called dangers of F1C. (Sometimes I think you actually court the idea of F1C being dangerous for macho effect.) Have you crossed the road recently? Who was it that thought someone was controlling their model at the World Champs?  That didn’t take long coming did it? Don’t do RC and try to call it Free Flight because it isn’t. It’s RC.  Successful RC duration classes exist already with tow launched sailplanes and impressive rocket and electric boosted craft. Michael Achterberg hasn’t done the simple maths for his sweet idea of a GPS triggered upwind rudder. Compute models speed and typical competition wind speed and you get – model still going away from you but just a bit less quickly! Sorry it won’t work.  All the altimeters, electronic timers and GPS tracking are fine and exciting but if you really want to retain Free Flight I am afraid you are going to have to stamp on RC for anything during the competition and stamp right now.

I have some more thoughts on that subject appearing in the October issue of Free Flight Quarterly. Give it a look.

Dave Hipperson. UK.