I don't really know why I wanted to drive all that way to complete in a model contest. If I think about it rationally there's no reason to add the stress of competition to an otherwise relaxing and harmless hobby. But there's a lot of life packed into any kind of contest. Many hobbies and recreations have organized contests, everything from fencing and swimming, to dog and flower shows. At their core these events, and in particular those obscure ones where there is little or no possible commercial gain to be had from winning, are much the same, and you have people who take them seriously to greater or lesser degrees. And you have a natural, human desire to do well, or at least to avoid embarrassing yourself. So over time you learn skills, and you learn to be prepared. These are good life lessons in general.

 

I think being involved in this stuff as a kid helped me to be a problem-solver. I may be sloppy and unprofessional in general (I'd be a terrible lawyer or doctor, and I'm not a particularly good project manager) but I think I know, more intuitively than most, how to fix things.

Model planes, whether control-line, radio control or free flight, have elements that are both technical and artistic, and they also carry some risk, which is by definition exciting: things go wrong, the wind gusts or the motor burps and a plane with hundreds of hours of building time gets broken, irreparably. Competitors help each other, they pass along useful information, they get into heated arguments. They lose, they go home with nothing more than they showed up with, and they often go home with a lot less.

 

So I went to Albany Airport in Oregon. The drive down from Kirkland was an easy four-plus hours, with lots of time to think when driving. I remember having brilliant thoughts the whole way and almost passed the Albany exit mid-thought, but I neglected to write any of them down. Lost forever are two novels, a new marketing strategy for my company, and a hundred or more keen and insightful observations for my journal.

Here's the hobbyist fantasy: trumpets blowing, flags waving... there are big trophies, television crews, lots of bunting, glistening model airplanes held aloft by buxom models-for-hire who kiss the winners and smile vacantly.

And here's the reality: the music is replaced by the constant din of angry little engines, alongside the quieter buzzing of muffled 4-strokes, occasionally punctuated by the mercifully short, ear-splitting roar of a pulse jet speed engine. The contest venue is sandwiched between an active light plane runway and the noisy interstate highway. Milling around in the five different areas (speed, racing, stunt, combat and carrier) are groups of grizzled old men in baseball caps with three-day-old beards, or somewhat more clean-shaven middle-aged model airplane nerds (I guess I fit into that category), and a very much smaller number of young newcomers. (This "sport" doesn't seem to draw in very many new participants... a shame, really.) A few dozen bored spouses recline in lawn chairs next to their RVs or their station wagons. There are no buxom models, no TV crews. One guy with a camera shows up from the local paper, copies of which are being passed around the next day (comment overheard: "geez, why did they pick that old dog of a plane to put in there?")
 

After arriving I pulled out my gear and started working with my Thunderbird stunter to get it ready. The weather was hot (into the 80s) so the plane flew quite differently that I was used to... and not very well. One old geezer scratched at his stubbly chin and said not very helpfully, "well, I'm not sure that thing will even do a wingover...". I switched to a prop with more pitch and it was even worse. Scott Riese (a very helpful guy I knew, but until this event only via email) was also getting his classic stunt plane ready and he suggested I try a smaller, fatter and hand-balanced prop that he had. It make a big difference, the motor revved up great with his prop and I had my power back.

Scott was having a very bad practice day. He flew his Smoothie twice and it was looking terrific. He had an old (really old, like maybe 45 years old) Fox .35 powering it which was an appropriate choice for the "classic" event (which features models designed prior to 1969). But on his third practice flight things went horribly wrong: I let go of the plane for him, it went straight ahead along the pavement, then abruptly pitched up vertical, over on its back and slammed with an awful "bang-crunch", prop-spinner first into the blacktop. A line connector had failed, or had not been properly closed. The airplane was destroyed (quite possibly the motor as well) and Scott was out of the running for two events (old time stunt and classic stunt). Adding to this, later in the day Scott was flying a big, weird but pretty biplane model. This thing (a "Bi-slob") was capable of hovering on its prop, doing five foot diameter loops and all kinds of oddball non-rulebook maneuvers. But when Scott did a hard inside corner the top wing ripped off its mounts and the plane came down in a heap, again on the blacktop. He just walked away for a few minutes to collect himself, then picked up the pieces. This was later in the evening, after the "take it all rather too seriously" precision aerobatics crowd had come and gone. I offered Scott my Smoothie model for the old time event. He said he would consider it but that he probably wouldn't fly, and that he would officiate instead.

 

After getting the T-bird running the way I wanted I went over the combat area and messed around with my gear. The motor ran well and the speed clocked in at just under the limit (80MPH) for the event.
 

After the sun went down and I had taken a shower (at the nearby Holiday Inn) I went into downtown Albany looking for some dinner. At first it looked like a completely dead place, but on First Avenue I found a brewpub in an old brick building and had a fine chicken dinner. Across the street there was a funky little coffee shop (Starbucks, stay away!) bustling with people -- and not a "toy airplane" hobbyist among them. There was a pair of quite tolerable alt/folk musicians performing. Very nice. I settled in with a book and had a cup of coffee. It was purported to be decaf, but I had trouble sleeping after I got back to the hotel.

The next morning I got up early -- I couldn't sleep anyway -- and went back to the airport. I was one of the first in line at the practice circle and got one flight with the Thunderbird. I had no problem there, it was much cooler weather and the motor ran well, so I drove over to the combat field. I had three hours of fun, mostly watching other matches, getting my equipment ready and helping others as pit crew, until I was eliminated in the third round by a 13 year old kid whose family owned a yappy little dog named "Dave". The family kept yelling at the dog, as in "Dave! Stop that and get over here! Dave? Where are you Dave?"...

How humiliating.
 

But it was good in a way: I only lost one combat airplane (mid-air collision), was done with that event by lunchtime and could focus the rest of the afternoon on the stunt event... my first stunt contest in perhaps twenty years (gosh, maybe more -- I flew a little combat in 1985-1987, but no stunt since probably 1981).

In Classic Stunt, flying my Thunderbird, I took last place. Not almost last... dead last.

There were two scored flights, and on the first one I went overtime because I couldn't get the motor running quickly enough and had too much fuel in the tank. I lost my pattern points and my landing points. The judges patiently explained that I needed to wait until I was sure the motor was ready to run (primed, etc.), then wave for the time to start. And measure my fuel. Duh.

The second flight was a little better, I scored 404, which was higher than a beginner (I completed the full pattern) but not by much. Just sloppy in general, and too nervous after watching Scott Riese destroy two airplanes the day before.

But worse than my scores (which I didn't expect much of) was how my Thunderbird looked next to the other planes. Even in the Classic event, which is supposed to represent stunt as it was flown 25 to 45 (or so) years ago, the builder/pilots had gone to extraordinary lengths to make their planes look perfect. High-gloss shines, intricate paintwork, perhaps hundreds of hours into the finish alone. Retired old men with nothing else to do in the winter time. So now the model I had been so proud of when it hung on the wall at home looked rough, bumpy, un-buffed and outclassed. People were nice... lots of pointers on how to improve the plane's trim and how to fly a better pattern... but still, I felt sort of like that clumsy 16-year old again, dragging my poorly-built schoolyard junk to contests where maybe I had no business being.

 

(I hadn't seen Phil Granderson since I was a kid. He barely remembered me, but he was one of the top combat fliers at the time and was always willing to help me out at contests. He would look at my awful gear and say things like, "OK... I'll start it, but then I'm gonna run...")

When I got back to the hotel (after a really awful "hanger feed" of fried chicken and beans, listening to old geezers talk about head clearances and castor versus synthetic oil) Satomi called from the neighbors' garden. They were having a great party. Man did I want to be there rather than in the Holiday Inn Albany. But I took a shower, went again into town for a salad, got to bed early and actually got a little sleep. In the morning I felt better, particularly after the precision aerobatics event got started.

What I determined on Sunday was that the beginner and intermediate flyers had mostly not signed up for Classic Stunt because there were no skill classes... and only the old-timers or the younger ones with more experience want to build a different airplane, particularly an older one that has lower performance, just to compete in Classic. In Precision Aero there are skill classes for Beginner, Intermediate (that's me), Advanced and Expert. So on Sunday morning I was placed along with six others of similar skills... and lo and behold my Thunderbird was now just as nice and pretty as the other planes. Maybe two were a bit better finished, but they were profile ships, not full fuselage beauties like the T-bird. And after some small adjustments suggested by others she really did fly well... much better than me. There's hope, if (as Bruce Hunt suggested) I can relax and just fly without being so petrified of that blacktop surface. All my maneuvers were bottoming at ten feet instead of five... I just couldn't bear the thought of my pretty plane smacking into that hard, hard surface.
 

"Joe" (John, actually) crashed the plane pictured above during a practice session on Sunday. He cut an outside square loop too low (the bottoms of the loops are supposed to be five feet off the deck, he seemed to be trying for five inches instead). The plane bounced, sheered off its canopy, rudder and prop but somehow he manhandled it around in a half loop to land dead-stick on its wheels. Minimal damage considering it was a full power, inverted touch-and-go on pavement.

My first flight was something of a bust because I left out one measly inverted lap (I needed to do a minimum of six and I guess I counted wrong) and lost the pattern points. The second flight was better, I scored 414 which is a decent intermediate score. And one expert who was watching encouraged me by saying the best maneuvers I did were after the judged pattern was finished and I was relaxing with some gentle loops and squares (he said, "two of us looked at those pretty outside loops and we thought, 'well, where did those come from?'").

Event details follow:

Combat

The goal of a combat event is, within a five minute match period, to either accumulate more points than your opponent (one point for each second in the air, and 100 points for each cut on the colored streamer) or kill your opponent outright by cutting the string leader that attaches the streamer to the other plane.

The events flown at Albany were speed limit combat (no faster than 80MPH) and 1/2A, which has an engine size limit. I flew the speed limit event, which is less costly due to a wide variety of cheap, available engines.

(Fast combat, which is now flown mostly at special "big money" events, has an engine limit of .36 cubic inch but no speed limit. Speeds in fast combat routinely exceed 125 MPH. That's very, very fast.)

Here's a terrific sequence I managed to capture by shooting almost non-stop stills with the digital camera: These two planes are each going close to the 80 mile per hour speed limit. Lots of close quarter combat going on, they have each scored a cut on the other:

Then with a CRUNCH they collide, one motor starts screaming with its prop sheared off and both fall to the ground:

Jeff (the judge) examines the wreckage to determine if either plane is flyable, and whether either of them scored a kill on the other in the wreck. No possibility of either going back in the air safely, and he determines that both string leaders are intact. They each have one cut so the match is won on airtime: whichever plane got in the air first at the starting horn has won.

Above and below are pictures of what I put together for the speed limit event. The airframes are FAI (international class) ready-to-fly models built by a guy in Ukraine (Yuvenko) and imported by a guy in Louisiana. Because the speed in this event is greater than 75MPH, the AMA (sanctioning body for model aviation contests in the U.S.) requires that fuel shutoff devices be employed. These I got from Jeff Rein, the judge in the previous picture, who happens to live in Kirkland. Jeff and his friend Tony designed and manufacture the shutoffs, and they are rather clever little things that instantly cut the fuel supply if there is any loss of line tension after the initial launch, such as would be the case if the control lines got cut or if there was a loss of control and the plane decided to come after its pilot's head.

To make it all work I had to strip out Yuvenko's internal control system and mount Jeff's combination shutoff/bellcrank externally. I also replaced the wire elevator pushrod with one made from an arrowshaft (less likelihood of bending). Finally, the motor mounts were shimmed wider allowing a .25 engine (a Chinese-made Magnum R/C sport motor with the carb removed and replaced by a nylon venturi that I fashioned out of a spacer I found in the nuts and bolts section at Home Depot) to be installed in place of the normal .15 used in FAI combat. The fuel is fed from a high-pressure bladder system through the shutoff, via the thin yellow tube, through a filter and remote needle valve (Japanese, from an OS Max motor) to a fitting I drilled and tapped a hole for in the side of the old carb mount.

Whew! That all sounds complicated but there isn't more than $150 in materials in the whole package, including the new-in-the-box motor, and everything is reusable again and again except for perhaps a few dollars worth of wood, foam and covering that would be "re-kitted" in a crash or mid-air...

...assuming, of course, I ever enter this event again. I'm not sure the fifteen minutes of thrill (I only lasted three rounds) was worth all the work. But the planes are fun to fly even without someone on your tail. I'll take them up to Arlington once in a while.

Speed...

I've never flown speed events, but they are wild to watch. Imagine a little plane, no bigger than a dinner plate, screaming around the circle at 200MPH. I watch these guys -- you can't help turning and watching when a pulse jet starts running -- but I can't comprehend how they do it, or why...

A speed guy described the "state of the art" to me on Saturday. Look at the previous picture. There are three FAI speed planes lying there. The international rules require a certain amount of wing area, so the designers figure, OK... the wing on the inside of the circle goes a little bit slower, hence less drag... so we'll extend the inboard wing as far into the circle as practical and remove the outboard wing entirely. They also figured out that a 2-blade propeller spinning at 40,000(!!!) RPMs will not be efficient because each blade disturbes the air that the other has to go through. So they eliminate one blade and counterbalance the shaft. Finally they add a tuned pipe to the exhaust to boost power to around 2.2 horsepower. (Do the math: if the V6 engine in your Honda Accord put out the same power per cubic inch as one of these little motors your car would have 2,640 horsepower instead of a measly 150.)

Stunt...

Speed and racing were on one end of the field, combat was way, way down on the other end, and in the middle was the sport of gentlemen: control-line precision aerobatics. Beautiful models, and more than 40 contestants flying three different events (Old Time, Classic and Precision Aerobatics). I flew my classic-legal (1959 design) Thunderbird in two events, did really badly but didn't break the plane, which is more than a couple of others can say. I was totally outclassed, but I guess I knew I would be...