Thought some of you might enjoy reading this account of the Illinois S.O.
Tournament
LeRoy Cordes YOLO
Chicago, Illinois
AMA 16974
In God We Trust
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Charles Markos
The IL SO tournament was held yesterday, April 16, at the U of IL
campus. Flight events were in the 95-foot armory. Two trial events
were featured: Capacitor-powered Wright Stuff and Indoor Towline
Glider. Oh yeah...the official helicopter event was also flown. We
were a busy crew of supervisors to get it all in from 8 am until 3:15
pm.
In the WS-cap event, the best flights in both Div-B (middle school)
and Div-C (high school) were well over 2 minutes. None of the teams
used geared motors. Three of the 2-minute flights carried a penny
ballast to bring their ready-to-fly weights over 13 grams. One Div-B
airplane resembling my "Double Whammy" design weighed exactly 12 grams
(no ballast) and was the only airplane to fly up to and hit the
ceiling truss. After the hit, it recovered nicely and kept flying
unlike the experience some of us have had with airplanes constructed
to minimum weight. The motor was attached to a pylon added behind the
wing TE. A 65 mm "tri-turbofan" prop from Plantraco was used. The
other high-performing airplanes were derivatives of the design I
developed as prototype (you all should have seen the plans) and used
the 55? mm Plantraco propeller. One had the motor on a separate pylon
behind the wing. Maximum altitude was a safe 60 feet. It was quite
interesting to observe the two best Div-C teams battle it out in
practice flights to push each other to do just a little bit better.
In towlline glider, the winning airplanes weighed about 5 grams and
their best flights in practice were in excess of 60 seconds. However,
official flights were plagued by towing mistakes. The phenomenon of
top teams pushing each other was obvious in practice. Teams that were
happy with 25-seconds in their school gyms watched rivals slowly
improve as they learned how to reach altitudes in excess of 50 ft as
an informal challange developed to get the competitive juices flowing.
In both trial events it was evident that the kids really enjoyed the
testing and flying of their ariplanes. I was able to help some during
the Friday night practice session, but on Saturday, they were on their
own to come up with solutions to any problems that came up. Very
gratifying.
We had about 20 entrants each in the two capacitor events divisions
and the same in towline glider, although there were a number of
no-shows.
Some of the cap airplanes had heavy RC motors and were hopeless, of
course. Some other hopeless models did not have supercapacitors or
were so poorly constructed that I felt bad for the kids. As usual, it
was quite obvious that some teams paid very little attention to the
availiable information, much less the rules for the
event...e.g..showing up with a 6-volt lantern battery for a charger.
One team found some "high energy" photo AA cells that were labelled
"Nickle oxide hydroxide" and were getting very good practice flights.
They were exchanged for AA alkaline cells at check-in. Comparison of
the alkaline vs the Nickle oxide cells showed a marked increase in
voltage for the latter.
Best flights in Helicopter were just over 2 minutes also.
Chuck
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Received on Sun Apr 17 2011 - 15:54:01 CEST