The CRRC team at the spring LISF contest consisted of Fritz Bien, Dave
Walter, John Nilsson, Mark Drela, Jose Bruzual, Miner Crary, Bruce
Schneider and your's truly. Most of us caravaned to the Econo Lodge in
Hicksville in the afternoon and were punished with heavy traffic in the
usual spots. The backup on the Hutch just after 287 was brutal, and our
feeble jokes about the fake cell tower pine tree didn't do much to relieve
the boredom, especially for Dave and Fritz in Frit'z Volvo with a dying AC.
It has been a long, cold winter, but last weekend tried to make up for it
with muggy, hazy temperatures in the 90's. Well, we made in 4 1/2 hours,
which wasn't too bad, and after hooking up with Jose, who drove in from
Upstate, we went to the Outback for a 1 hour wait and a steak, and then
time to crash.
Saturday morning was pretty steamy and there was a fresh breeze blowing
from the start. After breakfast at the "New Shiny Diner", we stocked up for
lunch at Stop and Shop and then off to the LISF field. The first thing we
noticed was how small the mown area was, and then how short the winch lines
were. My guess is that they weren't over 500' long. Allmost all of the CRRC
members showed up in Red Sox T-shrts and baseball caps, which the New
Yorkers took well. The briefing was the usual John Hauff briefing with a
couple of exceptions. For one, he didn't say "don't break my winch lines",
instead it was "no one is going to break these winch lines", and he was
right. I don't know how heavy the lines were, but there was basically no
stretch. Format was seeded MOM (Man-on-Man), with short-short landing tapes
and no field boundaries except being thrown out of the contest if we landed
in the adjacent soccer fields. The ground was so hard skegs didn't help
with the landings. The short, heavy winch lines, plus the fact that there
were no retrievers, and the 12-15 mph breeze combined to really stress the
planes, not helped by the fact that all flyers tried to make the most of
the launches. In the first round the carnage started. Phil Barnes ship (a
moldie) had violent aileron flutter on the zoom, he got it down in one
piece, but it looked like an ornicopter with violently fluttering ailerons
when he came in for the landing. Next to suffer problems was Mike
Lachowski, who broke a wing joiner on his moldie and did some spectacular
flying with one wing panel missing. Chris Schuch creased the center panel
of his Mantis, but by letting off on the winch on subsequent launches he
was able to fly it the rest of the weekend. Bruce creased the center panel
of his Aegea and had to make a rapid switch to his backup plane. I wimped
out and decided to fly after popping off on the first launch. All of this
in the first round! Dave's and John's repaired Aegea center sections didn't
have a problem at all. In the next round Josh Glaab broke his fuselage in
three pieces on the launch. My flying was miserable and I managed to pop
off twice, twist the wing once and launch into the sun on the final round.
I was rewarded with a position at the bottom of the heap. Being in
contention required some gutsy flying downwind, and it was amazing that we
only had two off-field (or rather in the woods) landings.In the third or
fourth round I was timing for Jose and he didn't make it back and landed in
the woods deep enough that it was non-trivial to locate the plane. Just
that morning we had talked about the value of having Walston retrievers,
and Jose commented that he really needed to get one. So we had a line to
his plane, but a heavy thicket of brush and thorns that forced us to take a
major detour. A quick walk through the woods during the lunch break didn't
locate the plane, and it was obvious we needed something more sophisticated
than random wandering. Our solution was to put my Walston transmitter in
Jose's pocket and leave Fritz on the field with the receiver. Communicating
with walkie-talkie's he was able to tell us where we were relative to the
line. I also took my PDA GPS and used two waypoints to define the line to
the plane. I was delighted to see that the new GPS worked in the woods.
Anyway, once we heard from Fritz that we were on the line, Chris was able
to walk right up to the plane. It was stuck about 30' up in a tree, but
Bill Anderson from LISF had two poles that could be taped together and were
long enough to reach the plane. A Y-shaped stick taped to the end was
perfect for hooking the tail, and after a little maneuvering we had it on
the ground with minimal damage. All scratched up from the plane retrieval,
and sweaty from the heat we returned back to the motel for a refreshing
shower. Dinner was at our new traditional place, the St. James.
Conversation at dinner and at Starbuck's afterwards centered on how to deal
with creasing wings. Mark's suggestion is to use riblets, something I had
never heard of before. Basically, a riblet is a thin piece of carbon that
is stuck through a slit in the wing skin into the foam, and then glued to
the foam and skin. It stiffens the skin and bonds it to the foam, both of
which increase the resistance to buckling by about 50%. Several of us are
going to add riblets to the top skins of our wings, either as repairs, or
preemptively to hopefully prevent future buckling. The final results for
Saturday were Tom Kiesling in first place in expert, followed by Jeff
Steifel, John Hauff, Terry Luckenbach and Hans Wiederkehr. In Sportsman
Leszek Zyga was in first place, CRRC's only sportsman at the contest, Miner
Crary in second, followed by Chuck Robinette, Frank Strommer and Pete
Nicholson. The best placing CRRC expert was Mark Drela in 6th. Dave Walter
was right behind in 7th.
Sunday morning was just as hot but less breezy. I would say that the wind
only gusted to 15 MPH. Interestingly, there were lots of line breaks in the
first round, but after replacing some line sections, the rest of the day
was almost free of line breaks. It was also free of the carnage from the
day before. My flying was marginally better and I started and ended up in
the middle of the pack of experts. Gordon Stratton is in the process of
emptying his house of model airplanes showed up with a pile of free flight
and rubber planes, plus a large ARF that Fritz wants to convert into an
electric aerotow plane. It will be fun if we can start doing a bit of
aerotowing. After only 5 rounds of flying the contest was ended giving us
an early start home, hopefully beating the traffic. In expert Tom Kiesling
was in 1st place again, followed by Josh Glaab, Jeff Steifel, Mark Drela
and Luis Bustamante. In sportsman Leszek Zyga was in first place again,
followed by George Hill,, Bill Vida, Chuck Robinette, and Pete Nicholson.
The trip home was a breeze in light traffic, but I was so tired I was sound
asleep on the sofa at 8:30.
It doesn't read like fun, but it was. I really enjoy the company of the
CRRC gang and meeting old friends at the contests. Flying is great, and
doing well every now and then is more than enough to keep me coming.
Overall it was a smooth contest, as always well run by LISF. Good job John
Hauff, Paul Bell, Cathy and Richard.
Anker Berg-Sonne
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