Just a little post to wish our Pat Mackenzie best luck at F3P World Championship

[Michael]

Thanks guys.

The preliminaries are all done, and I am officially the worst F3P pilot in the world 




Pat

If you're the worst, then we're all the worserest!

We're all proud of you participating, no matter what your score!

[piker]

Agreed.  Thanks for going the extra mile (and effort) to represent Canada!

Robert

[pmackenzie]

You may have been last of 49 pilots but in my view that makes you the 49th best pilot in the world.  You beat 10,000 MAAC members, you beat 100,000 AMA pilots in the US. and that is just two countries.  They didn't have the balls to stand in front of 48 pilots and several judges and sweat through a flying routine.

You did fine!

Frank van Beurden

Just for the record, there are plenty of American pilots who would have loved to have been here, but the short time frame between announcing the world champs and the event itself was not enough time in the AMA's opinion to have a proper team selection process in place. So no USA team.
Similar story for the British team I am told.
Fortunately we Canadians are more pragmatic and were able to go from zero to having a team in a very short time 

Pat MacKenzie

[pmackenzie]

FWIW, here is my third flight from the W/C. Lots of mistakes 

World Championship F3P 2013 - Pat MacKenzie

I need to do some more work on radio setup, I already have some aileron to motor mixing but need more. The plane just about stops when I roll on the first upline.
Also need way more expo on all the controls. Running about 40% now, should be up in the 70s based on what we were told by others.
I tried more but did not like it, so ending up actually reducing it a bit. More practice at the higher setting is in order.

[Michael]

Nice video and nice flight!

[pmackenzie]

Here are a couple more flights showing how it should be done.

First one is the guy who qualified in the top ten for the finals

World Championship F3P - Markus Zolitsch

Second one is by a plane with very clever brakes on the "canalizers". (The little wings on the top and bottom of the fuselage)
Incredibly effective on the down lines, they deploy whenever he pulls the throttle back.
(Also doesn't hurt that his model is a good 20 grams lighter than mine)

World Championship F3P 2013 - R. Mateos

[Ededge2002]

Thanks for posting Pat! 
I would love some info on your airplane as it looks to fly well and isn't covered in little devices to cancel out this or that.  As I would like to build something to get started at embarrassing myself to my fullest abilities do you have plans available?  I know there are some very exotic power systems out there but I'm curious to know what you used.

[pmackenzie]

The plane I flew is my own design. It is a simple plane in that it does not have a bunch of canalizers/SFGs/etc on it.
There are drag plates on the TE of all the flight surfaces, but for regular flying it is actual quite slow without them.

I went simple in part because there was no time to test anything complicated. I also wanted to see what could be done.
If you look at all the designs there is no single solution yet, there is so much variation that I figured a simple model would be fine.

Plans, possibly.  I was thinking of posting them somewhere. Too many "secrets" in the F3P world in my opinion.
If you look at the top ten planes only one is actually from a kit, the rest are all one offs.
(Two of them look like they are from the Spies kit, but they are actually a bit larger versions)

Power system on mine is not that high tech or expensive.

Scorpion motor for $40, 6 amp Turnigy ESC, 2S 180 Hyperion Lipo and (so far) just a GWS 9 x 4.7.
(I did pick up some carbon props to try, they save about 5 grams in weight and have lower pitch so the plane can't fly too fast)

http://www.innov8tivedesigns.com/product_info.php?cPath=21_25_140&products_id=1093

By comparison, the Glavik contra drive costs over $300. Scary part is, if they had been available I probably would have bought one.

Servos are 2 x D47 and 1 x DS188 on the ailerons. AR6300 with everything directly soldered to it.