Short contest report - Urbana Indoor Fling

From: <mkirda_at_sbcglobal.net>
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 18:18:40 -0000

Highlight: Dealing with the crazy balloon lady
Downside: Dealing with the crazy balloon lady.

Highlight: Everyone who signed up came.
Downside: Many who said they would come did not.

Highlight: Many spectators came through including someone who flew microfilm in the 1950's.
Downside: Not a single walk-in registrant.

Highlight: Watching Kagan and Richmond make it look easy.
Downside: Watching Nick Ray's model explode within 30 seconds of launch.

Highlight: 3 records broken, including Bill Gowen breaking F1M once, thinking he could still do better, then doing it. IIRC, it was 15:30 or so, then bested by 16:24? One of those flights missed the wall on his last turn by only a couple of inches.

Downside: One air handler had not been turned off despite reassurances from everyone involved. Despite this, I heard comment after comment that the air was much better than it had been in previous contest years.

My first model was flying wonderfully until the motor stick failed just after loading (at only .35 in/oz torque!) destroying my best wing, then wasting valuable time before I realized that it had caused the wire to fail at the tophat bend in the prop. Postmortem seemed to show a web had failed.

I'll leave it to Jeff or John to post results as I do not have them.

Regards.
Mike Kirda
Received on Sun Oct 14 2012 - 11:18:43 CEST