I have finally recovered from my trip to the Nats and have been reading all
the glowing remarks about the Nats. I decided that it was time to post a
letter about the negative side.
To be truthful, there wasn't much negative about the sailplane portion of
the Nats. The only real negative was that it was lonesome. Nothing but
Sailplanes. No free flight, scale, combat, etc. I enjoy almost all of
them except pylon racing. I might enjoy that too but I can't see much from
under my van. :-) The Nats at Vincennes was much better. We held the
sailplane events at the high school while most of the other events were
held across town at the Lawrenceville airport. On days when I was not
flying, I could drive over to the airport and talk with the few pattern
flyers from my era still active. Scale was always nice and I could
reminisce about the 50's when I was still flying control line stunt and
scale.
Then we consolidated everything to Muncie and had to spread the nats out to
a month to avoid frequency conflicts between pylon racing, pattern, scale,
sailplanes, electric, and even free flight. In some years, sailplane and
free flight were flown in the same week so it was still at least possible
to see other phases of model flying. This year, there was nothing. The
Nats were just like any other large contest like the Tangerine, Mid South,
or Visalia. I enjoy those contests too but the Nats is supposed to be
something special.
I was told that the reason for separating FF and sailplanes was some
complaints from both FF flyers and sailplaners about models dethermalizing
in the launch area. That's silly! My only complaint about the ff models
dethermalizing in the launch area was that there were none dethermalizing
out of thermals when it was my turn to launch.
Chuck Anderson
Attended 20 Nats since 1953. Had to work the other years.
RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and
"unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
