Fellas, this is a true story. Sometimes I kind of blur the line between
truth and fiction, between the hallowed fact and hallucination as it were.
That probably comes from the influence of some of my favorite writers, Mark
Twain, James Thurber, Gordy Stahl, people like that. But this one is true,
so help me Dave Thornburg.
I have be flying RC sailplanes for seven or eight years now, and my son
Andrew has been tagging along the whole time, since he was about 5 years
old. I have been offering him the chance to fly my planes since he was old
enough to hold the TX. He hasn't been interested. He still tags along,
though and has driven retriever carts at the Nats three times now.
This summer when we went back to Muncie we took along one of his middle
school buddies. Nostalgia/RES got rained out, so we wound up in the AMA
museum in mid afternoon. The boys looked at stuff, played the flight
simulators and then headed into the gift shop. They decided to spend some
of their money on small balsa hand-toss gliders.
Late in the day, Andrew and his buddy held an impromptu hand-toss glider
contest in the back yard. The next day we were down in the basement and I
showed him how to round the LE, taper the TE, round the fuse and saw off
extra wood. The little 99cent toy glider began to fly better. Andrew said
he wanted to build his own plane, and did I have any balsa?
We got a couple of sheets of 1/16th balsa at the local hobby shop to
supplement my giant box of scrap pieces. I have Andrew a few rules of thumb
for model glider design and went to work. Andrew worked on his design while
I was at the office. Late Friday night he and I had his first plane
built--a biplane no less. We hand tossed in the yard and he was ecstatic
when it actually glided a little bit. (I built a skinny monoplane with poly
wings, taped on the bottom to keep them from tearing off on launch.)
Then last Saturday we were back at the home field. A new member had a
beautiful new Sailaire he wanted to fly for the first time; another guy
wanted to try out a buddy box system; there were several high tech planes on
the field as well, a Mantis and a Psycho I think. Somehow we all wound up
throwing the little toy balsa hand-toss gliders, trying to see who could get
the best flight out of them.
The best times approached 13 seconds, about what I get on my typical
RCHLG flights. I think I'm onto something here. All those batteries and
servos and receivers are just weighing me down, making me interfere with the
model's natural inclination to fly just fine all by itself. And maybe they
were getting between Andrew and his desire to fly airplanes, too.
Sunday Andrew built his second plane.
Tom Nagel
Columbus, Ohio
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