On the Friday before going, Satomi and I had been out late watching a movie (Ferris Bueller's Day Off) at our friends' house. That, coupled with a little too much wine and a little too much anticipation, left me with around three hours of sleep before leaving the house in the morning. I had the gear all packed into the back of the truck, including four airplanes stacked neatly in a rack that I had built out of PVC pipes and foam pads. I had models prepared for four events: P-40 stunt (using a ratty old Sig Banshee), Old Time Stunt (using my three year old "Smoothie"), Classic Stunt (using the previous year's "Thunderbird" model) and Advanced Precision Aerobatics (using my new "Shoestring").

I stopped three times along the way for coffee but still managed to get to Albany Airport in slightly more than four hours. I listened to NPR and to some CDs on the way, traffic was light so it was a low-stress cruise the whole way.

The P-40 (profile model) event was already half over when I got to the contest so I decided not to enter. But I was there in time to fly in the Old Time Stunt event. That event went well for me; my Smoothie flew just fine even though I hadn't started the engine in many months.

Unfortunately while I was in the middle of my second stunt pattern Mike Haverly (who I usually team up with, sharing pit crew duties) crashed his airplane in the next circle during his second P-40 pattern attempt. His airplane was obliterated and the engine was completely torn apart on impact with the asphalt. After bouncing once, the front of the plane with the ruined engine attached came tumbling across the apron and into the circle where I was flying. That was a bit of a distraction but mostly I felt bad for Mike. His plane was almost new and he had put a lot of work into it. But that's the risk--and much of the excitement--in competing with model airplanes. You can spends months working on a model, getting it trimmed and ready, only to lose it in an instant to the hard, cruel ground.

In the afternoon I flew my Thunderbird twice in the Classic Stunt event. I can't seem to remember much about those flights but I scored a 400 on the better of them. Not a great score, but okay given the flukey winds, my lack of practice and (according to others) the pickiness of the judges. Everyone's score seemed low, which was fair enough.

I do remember one thing: on the second flight I almost lost the Thunderbird when the engine burped just before the last maneuver, the cloverleaf. That maneuver involves four partial loops clustered together to form a four-leaf clover, which is finished by a vertical climb -- a wingover into the wind -- up and over the top of the circle. I know the T-bird well enough now that I can recognize that burp as meaning the tank is going to run dry in just a few seconds. I took a chance, whipped the plane to get some speed and did the cloverleaf. During the final wingover, the engine quit directly over my head, and the plane started falling into the circle. I had to run downwind to regain line tension and recover the plane to level flight, then I had to whip the plane to complete the required final two laps with no power before landing. Again, these are chances we take in competition that we might never take in more recreational "Sunday" flying. I got away with it this time, though the next day I wasn't so lucky.

On Saturday evening and Sunday morning I flew three practice flights with the Shoestring. They were great flights, I was doing full patterns and the plane behaved perfectly, even though I'd had very little time to trim it or practice flying in various wind conditions. I should have gone home right then and saved a hotel bill. Instead (well, of course) I paid the nominal fee and entered the Advanced Precision Aerobatics event the next day.

Although in the morning the winds were calm and the air cool, about the time the Advanced event started the weather was beginning to get "difficult". Winds were unpredictable, it rained on and off and my well-behaved airplane was now becoming something of a problem child. I had built it a little too heavy, it had an engine that was really too big and in the wind it really wound up tight, turning loops that were scary fast and pulling hard on the handle during the two practice flights I took before the event. In fact it was pulling so hard it was like I was flying a tractor, not a model airplane. I should have been able to handle it but somehow in my first official flight I botched the vertical eight maneuver and found myself inverted a little too low to finish the eight. I tried to turn the corner (a half loop from inverted to upright) but needed about three inches more altitude to make it. The plane struck the ground in a nearly level attitude, the landing gear ripped off the bottom and the propeller sheared off from the hub with a sickening noise. The airplane bounced and climbed back up from the momentum, still flying/gliding, but now with the engine stopped and with no landing gear. I started running in a backwards circle to whip the model while everyone yelled conflicting advice: "Land it upwind!", "Whip it around!", "Head for the grass!" The grass that was being suggested was a strip about twelve feet wide between a taxiway and the parking apron. I tried to line up with it on the first whipped lap but realized on that first pass that the plane was moving too fast (downwind) and I couldn't judge the distance to the grass anyway. I whipped it around for another lap hoping someone would run out and try to catch it, which was another yelled suggestion. Nope, they all thought I was heading for the grass again. Finally I stalled it out into the wind over the pavement. Bad move. The plane dropped from four feet up, the fuselage cracked into two pieces, the motor mounts broke. Ugly. But fixable.

I thought I would pack things up and go after that, but after obsessing about the wind and borrowing a better propeller from Mike I flew the classic T-Bird for my second attempt. It was a lousy score but at least I was on the board with two flights and wasn't in last place. I helped Mike with his Advanced flights (he had another model in addition to the one he broke) then packed up my models and headed for home.

Summary: 8.5 hours of driving to get six official flights (and four practice flights) of seven minutes each. Resulting in one broken airplane. But hey, some people drive longer distances than that to play one or two rounds of golf. Now there's a game/sport/hobby that I will never understand. Ha ha.

Bjorn emailed to chide me for that comment... Not the golf thing, although coincidentally he had spent who knows how much money in avgas and fees to play a round of charity golf on the same weekend. No, his point was that I spent all that driving time to hang around with friends for a weekend. And of course he's right. The model plane crowd is wildly diverse, everything from libertarian-gun-rights types to reformed Nader voters and lifelong Democrats. There are current and retired machinists, computer types, plumbers and salespeople, at least one genuine rocket scientist, financial planners and school teachers. Some are on unemployment, some are probably stock option millionaire retirees. In any other context many of them probably couldn't stand each other. But when they (we) get together to play with model planes all that stuff goes away, which is why hobbies -- the kind that don't make people shut-ins, that is -- can be so good.