Small Flying Arts

June was the two contest month for the O.F.F.C., Spot Landing/Predicted Time and Penny Plane. Spot Landing/Predicted Time is the only outdoor contest in the O.F.F.C. schedule. There was an interesting selection of models flown from Guillow's slip-togethers to scratch built models done just for the c...

Here's a video of it flying. I had a good flight indoor, chasing the penny planes around the ceiling... weighs 20 grams so it made the penny plane fliers nervous, but somehow I screwed up the video. We were chased out of the gym because they were setting up for the pre-schooler's lunch (gotta love s...

I thought that I had a production prototype all sorted out but it did some strange things at the O.F.F.C. Predicted Time/Spot Landing contest last Wednesday. It flew fine in dead air but modest breezes discombobulated it. I had to put it on the balance rig and go back to the math to make sure that i...

The P-18 contest was held on April 30. Although a contest for models that tend to float around in a stately fashion it was quite exciting to watch. Maybe this is even more so because of the obstructions in the flying site. More interesting are the varying techniques used to try to get maximum perfor...

At today's O.F.F.C. meeting the question of the P-18s for the contest being built "to plan" was settled. Stan gave out the official rules and they specified the North Pacific prop and front end "with no upgrades". Dave Gee surprised everyone by supplying, from his amazing stash, ...

Legal Eagle was the O.F.F.C. contest for April and it was well attended with 11 contestants. The field quickly separated into two groups, the over 100 seconds crowd and the under 100 seconds crowd. Most of the designs flown were well known. The iconoclasts were myself and Dave Gee. Dave threw a new...

What follows is Hugh Langhans' report on the FAC contest from the FAC page in the Black Sheep Exhibition Squadron newsletter: The much postponed contest for Wade Wiley's Basin Flier, Dime Scale and Golden Age was attempted on Sunday, April 22, 2018 at the Grassy Knoll. There were five entries in the...

More photos from the Don Martin Cup: My venerable Sillycopter photo(126).JPG My autogyro, the larger disk under the rotor hub is a pulley for a spinup lanyard for ROG take offs. The first time I used it I was surprised by the amount of coordination required to hold the prop and the model on the floo...

The attendance at the Don Martin Cup competition was somewhat disappointing. No one showed up with a scale helicopter or a Chinook although I know that several people out here build them. It might have been Friday night traffic, which is horrendous in the Los Angeles area. (If you've never driven ou...