This coming Wednesday- training 5pm-8pm June 22 - Calibrating our eyeballs

[Frank v B]

There will be training this coming Wednesday starting at 5 pm.  I will be there regardless of the weather and the forecast...as usual.

This week we are going to concentrate on calibrating our eyeballs on the location of your planes relative to the road.  We had two incidents last week where planes flew over the road.  One crashed onto the road.

When training gets under way, I will sit in my car at the top of the driveway and report by cellphone how far each plane is from or over the road.  A person* at the pilot stations will then tell each pilot the distance.  It will allow all of us to calibrate our eyeballs.
Flying too close to or over the road is against both our Club rules and MAAC rules.  It would be great to know exactly.

Frank

* Andy has volunteered to do this if he gets reprieve from his household duties.  He reports to a higher power.....his wife!

[Frank v B]

Wow that was windy and from the north.  The instructors outnumbered the students.  Those who flew became better pilots, both on flying in wind and when to call it quits.

Thanks to the instructors who came out- Oscar, Carlos, Philip, Vadim, BJ, Mark.  Students were Paul S. and Amir.  Conclusion- a lot of students were smarter than a lot of instructors.

I elected not to sit at the road to watch for Road Warriors because by the time someone got close to the road and was halfway through a turn, the plane had already been blown 100 feet south.  I was more concerned about cars blowing off the road and onto our field!!   Will do the Road watch next week.

It was fun watching 10 year old Izzy fly his 2.4 meter Power Glider (Volantex).  He was launched at least 6 times into the strong winds.  I flew the first launch and handed him the transmitter at a safe height.  He flew the rest of the launches himself.  His flying was absolutely fine and he landed them all but one* perfectly in very tough conditions.  He handled every landing amazingly well.  The landings were judged by the peanut gallery with applause.  Great flying.  Thanks to Vadim for the use of his charger since Izzy only had two batteries.  (* he ran out of juice and we could not bring it back to the field. The plane was fine.)

Vadim and I flew twice with our EF-1's to discharge some batteries from the cancelled races 10 days ago.

Lost....please find!!- My Pogo spit a starboard (right) wheel within a white wheel pant ("Spat" if you are Simon..... both of them!).  I think it came off about 100-150' into the corn in line with the south end of the clump of trees ahead of the pilot station.  Please look for it when you retrieve your next errant airplane or are planting foam or balsa wood.

Sorry, no photos this week.

Frank

Executive summary of the weather conditions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9X0dJfH0tE