SEN 2940
- Fab Feb Sign Up
- FAI Model Supply Super Sport Rubber at Fab Feb
- Upcoming Flying Neuron
- Roger Barron passing
Fab Feb Sign Up
For the FAI events you sign up on line at https://forms.gle/yUnWgJ2k4CikWJkD7
But when get to Lost Hills you need pay your entry fees, sign the safety sheet and have your license checked. This will be at the Van Nest’s trailer. There will be a large sign. It will be open from 10 AM to 6 PM on Friday 11 January. If you are not flying in the Kiwi Cup you can sign at that same place later in the week.
FAI Model Supply Super Sport Rubber at Fab Feb
FAI Model Supply will be providing rubber and supplies to all those who pre-order for delivery at the FAB February Contests in Lost Hills, CA. We have already received a number of orders at this time.
If you are interested in ordering items, we ask that you please send us an email to sales@faimodelsupply.com. Please only order if you are positive you will attend. If you order and do not pick up, we will charge you the cost of shipping the item back to our office.
We will confirm back to you with an invoice indicating your total cost from the group shipment to be collected at Lost Hills or prepaid arrangements available prior to the contest via PayPal. Our plans are to distribute at the contest registration on Friday February 11.
We will need to receive your order by February 1 to guarantee delivery in Lost Hills. Any order/request received after that date can not be guaranteed to be delivered at the contest.
Our next batch of rubber will be available the week of January 24.
Thank you,
Charlie & Geralyn Jones
FAI Model Supply Inc.
Upcoming Flying Neuron
From: Frédéric ABERLENC
Dear Friends
My company Flying Neurons will release soon a new small GPS system. It will smaller than Icare2 and will include RDT, Flasher and certified altimeter. Documentation will be available in February on www.flyingneurons.com.
Regards Frederic ABERLENC
Roger Barron passing
From: Andrew Barron
We publish here a recent piece from well known USA F1A sportsman Andrew Barron who talks about his father Roger Barron who passed away at the very end of December. We pass on our condolences to Andrew and the other members of the Flying Barrons family. Because we do not publish photos we could not include some of the photos that accompanied Andrew’s original article. Many have been inspired by how Roger Barron’s passion for model aircraft encouraged him to learn more and go on to a successful career in technology innovation and business.
Dear Free Flight Friends,
My father Roger L Barron (AMA 777) passed away peacefully December 28, 2021
at home with his immediate family at age 87. You can find his obituary at
https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Roger-L-Barron?obId=23530432#/obituaryInfo
Roger was an industry leader in flight vehicle guidance and control, and in
the use of adaptive learning networks (now called “deep learning”) in a
range of tasks from avionics to econometric forecasting to ultrasonic
non-destructive evaluation of materials. He was founder, president and
senior scientist of Adaptronics, Inc, from 1961 to 1981 and later Barron
Associates, Inc, from 1983 to 1999. I could write at length on his
professional activity, but my purpose here is to let you know of his Free Flight activities and mentoring and the effect of his model aviation hobby on his career.
Roger started building free flight planes in 1940 at age six, starting with
rubber models, but by 1942 focussed on free flight gas models, building and
flying alongside his older sister Bebe Barron and his father Bryton Barron,
who, together with ground support from his mother Ella Barron, constituted
the Flying Barrons. They attended competitions throughout the eastern half
of the US from the mid 1940s till the mid 1950s, at a time when the number
of competitors at each meet would be many hundreds. You can read about some
of their exploits in the attached Boys Life article from February 1951. His
favorite plane was a Goldberg Sailplane. It gave him some majestic
experiences, including first in Junior D Gas at the 1948 National
Championships in Olathe, Kansas, at which he set one of his four national
records, and later spectacular flights at the Plymouth International in
Detroit in 1950, at which his plane circled overhead for eight minutes,
before a thermal wind whisked it off-field and then out-of-site after
reaching a ten minute max, one of only two such maxes achieved among the
approximate 500 fliers at the Plymouth Internats, according to the Boys
Life article.
Roger loved to glory in such long overhead flights. His mother Ella
suggested he consider incorporating a little radio control in his
free-flight models to facilitate this objective, concerned as she was over
the long retreival searches on off-field flights. So, starting at age 13,
Roger studied for and received his FCC license to operate an amateur radio
(station W4NQV, later W4EI, a code prized among “hams” for Morse keying, as
the letters E and I are especially suscinct). He became the youngest
licensed operator of radio controlled model aircraft in the United States.
Borrowing some traits of existing free-flight models he designed and built
his own radio-controlled model (as pictured in the attached article) and
with it he competed at that same Olathe Nationals, and also received a
first at the Washington Science Fair. Nevertheless, as explained in the
article, despite this foray into radio control, long free-flight flights
were his true passion.
These dual aviation and electronics interests lead Roger to study as an
undergraduate at Princeton University in Aeronautical Engineering and then
graduate study at Cambridge University and M.I.T in Electrical Engineering,
preparing him for the career I mentioned above. He remained active in
amateur radio. His professional aeronautical and electrical engineering
activity gravitated more toward automated onboard control (rather than
radio control) of various aircraft, munitions, and drones. He pioneered
methods that combined theoretical specification with empirically determined
rules fit to match optimal nonlinear control as established by extensive
computational simulations.
After college, Roger’s free-flight activity were primarily vicarious,
serving in support of my building and flying from 1966 to present, as well
as that of his father Bryton Barron (who continued to be active in free
flight in Virginia and later in Florida throughout his life until his
passing in 1989), his nephews Ed and Roger Seward, and his Grandkids (my
kids) John, Peter, Timothy, Michelle, Julie, and Geordie, as well as his
Grandson Jordan Crittenden. Each of these Grandkids have received National
Championship awards themselves, often with flights retrieved by their
Grandfather Roger who loved to run proudly underneath them. Roger strongly
believed in the individual and collective benefit to society of immersion
of our youth in this great hobby.
Such eastern US free flight leaders as Bob Hatschek and Bob Sifleet have
enjoyed commenting to me that they have had the pleasure of competing
against all four generations of Flying Barrons (from Bryton, to Roger and
Bebe, to myself and then my kids).
One time (perhaps around 1974) when I was a teenager struggling to best
trimming a hand launch glider (HLG), my father gave constructive criticism,
and, as typical of teenagers, I pushed his ideas aside, derisively saying
“what would you know about it.” So in the next week he built the most
beautiful five panel HLG with fastenating sweeps of taper of balsa ahead of
the otherwise regularly shaped horizontal and vertical tails. It flew away
beautifully on its first or second official flight when he choose to
compete with it at the next contest at the Johnsville, PA, Air Station.
Dad loved to retrieve. In 1977 when I first tried to make it on the US F1A
team at a rescheduled finals in Bowie, MD, I repeatedly allowed the DT to
go for three minutes even though it put the model deep in woods (prior to
the time of radio trackers), and each time Roger would prayerfully
determine a way to find it and bring it back ready to keep going. In fact,
that experience had a profound spiritual impact in his life. In 1994, when
I made it on my first US Free-Flight Team in F1A at a Palm Bay, FL, finals,
Roger would run straight for the model, typically traversing multiple full
ditches of water, often arriving before my mother and I riding circuitously
around on the roads on a four-wheeler.
In November of this past year (2021) when I visited Roger was keen to share
ideas of addition to my glider wings of small pieces near the wing root
which would constructively generate and control wing vortices to improve
performance (reminding me of what he did in his HLG design). In December,
when I visited him in home hospice care, he was delighting in the vision of
very long glider flights soaring overhead for hours, in part from these
innovations, but mostly because it was a great way to spend his last hours,
his eyes gazing heavenward.
Thermals!
Andrew
From the editor Further Thanks
One item that Andrew did not mention is that as one of the Flying Barrons, Roger Barron played an important role in acquisition of the Barron Field flying site in Wawayada, New York. I’m not sure how they found Wawayanda in North Eastern part of the USA where there seem to be big cities, beautiful coastline and green hills. But it is certainly an excellent site those who live or visit that part of the USA.