Brings to mind an experience last fall. At the September Club contest the wind was blowing 15-20 many of the guys chickened out to fly, guess they thought it was too windy. We won't mention names.
I put some borrowed ballast in my Escape cause I forgot my Pat McCleave custom ballast. Duh. This is the most wind I have flown the recently new Escape in. So I step up to a Freddette winch, Ford long shaft, mono, and a positive brake. I got kicked to the right on launch, maybe I screwed up something, so I stepped on it to get some line speed to recover straight. No problem except I traveled about 100 feet to the right. As soon as I righted I hit the elevation where the wind is much stronger. I immediately let off the foot pedal because the plane had plenty of speed, tension and was climbing fast. Except the energy just kept building. It seemed like magic, a perpetual machine. The drum was not letting any line out! It looked like one of those 4 man F3J tows. I thought my wings were going to break, I have never seen Escape wings bend like that, they were elliptical. I realized I had to get off the line before my plane broke. A quick "blip" and I rocketed off like a bat outta hell. It seemed to zoom another 200 feet. Wow, that was an unexpected adrenalin launch. Yes. Mono + locking drum + wind = Wild launches Steve At 06:29 PM 2/14/2002 -0600, James V. Bacus wrote: >The majority of the Ford longshaft winches the SOAR club uses have a >positive break like the FAI winches. This allows us to load them up with >mono for some real launching fun! 8-) > > >Jim RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
