USIC 2015 - a narrow view (mine)

From: <wdgowen_at_gmail.com>
Date: 13 Jun 2015 08:15:29 -0700

Here's a little bit about my week at USIC

Day 1 and 2 - What can I say that I haven't already? WIF7 was awesome and will go back into retirement.

Day 3 - I had my sights set on a 7 minute A6 flight but ti didn't happen. 6:00 was my best one.

Day 4 - I managed somehow to hang up my F1M on a light fixture on my first test flight. Then when I was getting it off, I stuck my steering pole between the rubber and the motor stick where it got tangled and stuck to the model. A lot of damage was done - a huge hole over 2 rib bays, a broken TE spar and a broken prop spar. I spent the next 2 hours doing repairs. After that I did my first official flight which climbed about 15 feet and flew the entire flight at that altitude. The time was 12:54 and was my best flight of the day. After that many attempts to find the right settings on my VP were mostly unsuccessful.

Day 5 - I walked in to the site at about 12:30 to get ready to fly LPP at 1:00. Sometime during my practice flights I noticed that there were already 40 or 50 LPP official flights listed on the time sheet. What came next wasn't pretty but I'll leave it at that.

After a few low wind test flights I put up a "safe" full motor flight which spent a lot of time scrubbing the ceiling and landed at 8:27. This turned out to be my best LPP flight of the day. I rewound, backed off some additional turns and flew a fairly conservative first flight of 8:11. The plan at that point is to be a little less conservative on each subsequent flight. So here's how well the plan worked:

Flight 1 - 8:11
Flight 2 - 6:17 with model flying really fast (should have stepped back here and looked more closely at the model)
Flight 3 - 2:51 model bunped a light fixture and spun to the floor (another missed clue)
Flight 4 - 7:00 another spin in but revered about 6' from floor. I stopped the flight to save time. Decided the spins were due to a bad wing post and added a bunch of CA to stiffen them up.

With one flight left I retrimmed the model and broke in a new motor. Everything looked perfect for my last flight

Flight 5 - 2:33 the model started out the flight with a HUGE circle, flew about 5 laps and crashed into the auditorium seats. I suspect that the tail boom broke somewhere during the afternoon and finally gave up on the last flight.

Best official LPP flights were 8:33 by DeLoach, 8:18 by Romash and my 8:11.

I thought this was a very enjoyable contest and a great city to spend a week in. The scenery was incredible, lots of stuff to do in the lulls in the competition and the local MMM organizers did their usual great job of running the contest and making everyone comfortable.

 

Received on Sat Jun 13 2015 - 08:15:29 CEST