Oct - Rcsoaring.com

adrenaline is up in preparation. In short,with the large geographical challengesthe US presents, there is no way toget everyone together to practice a fulltension launch until you get everyonetogether at the World Championships.The plane flew again with a borrowedstab.Also during practice, the center panelof Brendon’s “lite” aircraft fluttered onlaunch. We repaired the skins and built abox around the servo connecting the topand bottom skins in an effort to eliminatethe problem. It worked. I think that Daryllater built a similar “field upgrade” intohis own planes. No flutter the rest of thecontest.AJ McGowan had an off field landing inthe Cup when the plane just would notpenetrate in the high winds late in theafternoon. Lucky for him, no damage.Rich Burnoski had a great looking Suprauntil it hit the thrower’s hand on launch.The stab was toast along with the centersection. Rich located a new “lite” centersection and a new stabilizer. The Teamjumped in and repaired the plane inabout six and a half hours. Unfortunately,on its first test flight, the “lite” centersection failed. The wing, fin/rudder andfuselage were destroyed. The brokenfuse was repaired, and the fin/rudderreassembled and reattached. A wing andstabilizer were borrowed from Joe Wurts.Over the next several days the plane wasrepaired and reassembled.With up to 16 planes on launch at onetime, near misses were not just common,they were the rule. As the secondsbefore launch ticked down, we began toresemble rabid NASCAR fans looking forMike Lee, highest scoring Spor Yapi Cup pilot with a NAN Modelsmodel, won this brand new NAN Models Xplorer for his effort.the inevitable pileup in turn one of thefirst lap. All eyes were on the flight line foreach launch. You could hear collectivegasps from the crowd when near missesoccurred. When there was contact, it wasspectacular.October 2008 13