|============== Azalea City Model Aeronautics, Mobile, Alabama,
USA ===============|
================= “From the Pits” Field Activities
— August 02, ’09 ================
………….....….. All photos and videos
by Frits Jetten unless otherwise indicated …………………..
Here are some highlights of the past few weekends… Katarina
“Katt” Connors flew her Align T-Rex 600 Nitro helicopter.
Nicely, I might add. Katt has returned to active status, so we’ll
see her and her helis, electric ducted fan jets and turbine jets more
often. Oh, yeah, she has three turbine jets now. A Shock Jet,
an F-15 and an F-16.
By the way, you turbine people, when starting up your turbine jets,
please try to protect our grass. Or do it on the asphalt pads at the
end of the two taxi lanes. Jeff Foster, our Field Marshal is a bit
stressed out about those brown
patches…
Elton Sullivan flew his colorful Sundowner.
She’s a hot
little devil… Ken Tow brought out another new one, the Banchee,
a fairly large electric.
It flew very
well… Roger Hagler showed up with a new biplane, a Fokker
D-VII. Originally designed as an electric plane, Roger put a .15
nitro engine on it. He also flew his P-38 Lightning, a small twin-engine
model.
Gary Johnson asked Frits to fly his small electric MiG jet, the one
with the thrust-vectoring feature. The motor is mounted on the elevator
surface, making for some nice, sensitive
control! Gary launched it under-handed, and that worked well.
Remember how he sliced up his fingers using an over-handed throw during
an early test flight? Frits had a very nice and uneventful flight
and he had no problems landing it. Oh, Gary’s wife Rhonda hopes
to fly her new Swift II flying wing soon.
Andrew had created a Batplane out of pink foam. And it was time for
its first flight. A flight that was brief!
Attempt number two did not do much better.
And attempt number three ended the Batplane’s test flights for
the day…
Randy Bodiford flew his small HobbyZone electric foam Cub and the
plane with the funny name, the Ur-Star
40…
Henry Waltman flew his good ol’ Spacewalker.
He had an excellent flight. Henry wanted to be sure that his picture
appeared in this report,
as he believes it will increase readership. Anything to bump up the
number of readers is fine, Henry… Frank Madison brought his
Pitts Special, the "Miss Piggy", a stagger-wing biplane.
The canopy flew off in flight, scaring the pilot, Miss Piggy, who
bailed out. Luckily, both the canopy and pilot were recovered…
Frank Rowell showed up with a couple of his planes. The Strega racing
plane was one of
them. And he showed off his colorful Ultimate
Bipe. Nice knife-edge, Frank…
Larry Rogers flew one of his helicopters, a Hawk, I
believe… Remember this
guy? He’s Esam Guirges, who resurfaced after a 3-year absence.
He had brought his Solo Star trainer, and asked Frits to do a flight
on it. Esam hopes to join our club soon... Bill Slagle is becoming
more skilled at flying all his planes. He recently flew his CAP-232.
He can even do “tricks”.
And also brought his newest addition. It’s scale.
Yep, it’s the tiniest Sukhoi you have ever seen!
The Takeoff was easy.
And Bill flew it very
well.
Robert Sanderson keeps bringing out the apparently indestructible
Double Trouble twin-engine speed
plane. How is that finger, you ask? Robert says it’s fine,
thank you. He
asked Frits to fly the Double Trouble again. And after a perfect hand-launch
by Robert, Frits took it off and had a nice, long flight with it.
He did some loops and rolls and made several low altitude, high speed
passes. The landing was steep (this plane does NOT glide!) but flawless…
Then Frits told Robert to let Andrew Smith fly it. He was confident
that Andrew was well-capable of handling this sometimes squirrelly
plane. Well, first there was a problem with the left engine.
Finally, Andrew was good to go. But, after a perfect hand-launch by
Robert, the plane went hard right and crashed.
Frits was stunned! How could that have happened? After all, he had
it all trimmed out for Andrew.
Well, after using the process of elimination and some prodding, Robert
finally confessed that he “might have tampered with the aileron
trim settings” just prior to Andrew’s flight. Sigh…
He just WILL NOT leave things alone!
David Doss showed off a nice, new Yak-54.
Just showed it off. No flight today. It would have been the Yak’s
first flight… Paul Kelly had a couple of nice flights with his
relatively new Pete
& Poke. And he had Mike McLaughlin fly his Corsair…
Al Ayler flew his SNJ Texan recently. He had problems with the retracts
and had to put it down on its belly.
No damage... He DID do plenty of damage to some watermelons that Robert
had brought for all to enjoy…
Al had brought his 1/3 scale Aeronca Champ last weekend. It took many
people, including the North End’s Senior Advisory Group (SAG),
to get this big baby going.
But go it did not. The Champ stayed grounded, awaiting the resolution
of some engine issues.
Tal Fowler flew his latest toy. No, not a RC helicopter. It was his
new full-scale ultralight
airplane. Tal visited for a while…
And, hey, have you noticed that the North End has now acquired their
own beach front?
How did that get passed? Sand and model engines — I just don’t
know…
I’ll see you at the field. Fly safe!
============ Advertising Your For Sale Stuff in the Swap
Shop ======================
You know you can advertise your For Sale items with photos in the
Mobile Area RC Aviation Forum’s Swap Shop. Go to the main menu
shown on the left of this report and select Swap Shop. First-timers
must register with a username and password, but that’s free
and it is very easy. If you have questions or need help with this,
just e-mail me > fjetten@aol.com..
=========== Keeping those videos for sharing with others ===========================
Several people have asked me about this… The videos that I
take are stored on my computer. The files are large, and that’s
why I always make short videos, usually less than a minute, but always
less than two minutes long. It’s normally too impractical to
share them by e-mail.
But once a video has been posted on YouTube, it’s there “forever”.
You can always go back to it. Just copy that string of characters
in the browser window right above the video, and save it in a text
file on your computer. That string looks like this example > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5QpxUdZFYU
.
By clicking on it later, or, if that doesn’t work, by placing
it back into your Internet browser and hitting the enter key, you
can see it over and over again.
If you want your own copy of videos that features you and your plane,
let me know. I can put them on a DVD for you. They’ll be in
.MOV format. The quality will be much better. The image will be much
sharper, that is. The way I video taped it will remain the same!…
E-mail me > fjetten@aol.com.
========= Advertising Your For Sale Stuff in the Swap Shop
===========
You know you can advertise your For Sale items with photos in the
Mobile Area RC Aviation Forum’s Swap Shop.
Go to the main menu shown on the left of this report
and select Swap Shop. First-timers must register
with a username and password, but that’s free and it is very
easy.
If you have questions or need help with this, just e-mail me >
fjetten@aol.com..
======== If You Have Any Comments About These Pits Reports…
=====
I welcome any comments regarding these Pits Reports — good
or bad.
E-mail me > fjetten@aol.com.
Azalea City Model Aeronautics Website > http://www.acma-rc.com/index.html
Frits Goes Hollywood - Click For Details
