Any questions, PM me.

Pete Bauer

Chairman for the AMA FAI Scale Team Program

I did not have nearly as much time to keep everyone updated as I expected, I suppose that's good.  There is A LOT going on at these and it keeps you pretty busy.  Not to mention keeping your airplane airworthy and ready for the next round.

I'm not even sure where to begin but I'll start with this pic, courtesy of the BMFA.  These are the Static Judges, Flight Judges, Flight line staff, office staff, BMFA staff, and general runners and helpers.  Without them this would not be possible.  Looking at the pic this isn't even all of them, a few are missing.  It really takes a lot of people to make something like this possible.  I'd love to list out everyone but I only know half of them.

Next up are the winners.  I believe the final results have been posted already so I'll just put up the podium pictures.

F4B Individuals

1st-Mike McHenry (USA), 2nd-Vaclav Stastny (CZE), 3rd-Peter Bauer (USA)

F4B Team

1st-Czech Republic, 2nd-USA, 3rd-Poland

F4H Individual

1st-Reto Senn (SUI), 2nd-Vladimir Rynes Jr (CZE), 3rd-Gianluca DeMarchi (SMR)

F4H Team

1st-Czech Republic, 2nd-France, 3rd-Switzerland 

F4C Individual

1st-Marc Levy (FRA), 2nd-David Law (AUS), 3rd-Jan Doubrava (CZE)

F4C Team

1st-France, 2nd-Czech Republic, 3rd-Germany

It was a very good showing for the Czech team with a Individual AND a Team podium finish in all 3 classes, 2 of the teams in 1st place. Having one individual who can get a podium finish is really good, having one on every podium is exceptional.  Also the French had a strong showing with a team podium finish in the 2 classes they entered. 

Here's the F4C winners with their callers and planes

I mentioned it before but the scorekeeping was done using a system called escribe.  HERE'S their website.  I know very little about how it all works but the flight judges use this handset to input scores.  It's designed for pattern so the primary way to keep score is to hit the - button every time the competitor makes a mistake to deduct 1/4 point or whatever.  In scale they input the score using the other number keys.  The handsets communicate wirelessly with the scorekeeping computer which tabulates all the scores and displays them on the website.  It automatically removes the highest and lowest scores for each maneuver and the lowest flight score as well as doing the normalizing and ranking.  It's a pretty neat system and seems fairly mature, other than the occasional handset issues (maybe a dead battery?) I wasn't aware of any issues.  Watching scores update live and seeing the rankings continuously shuffle due to the normalizing was interesting.

And now some random photos 

I'll start with some inflight shots, courtesy of the BMFA.  They had at least one photographer out there getting pictures the entire time.  I didn't have a proper camera with a long lens so I didn't take any inflight shots.  Well, except for that one day when I nicked someone's proper camera .  But I don't have those pics

Jack Buckley's (USA) 1/3 scale Mini Max.  This is at least Jack's 2nd Mini Max and it's a brilliant model of a truly POS airplane.  It's been called the Giant Killer for it's ability to beat much larger, more complex planes.  Someone commented that they didn't know they let Ugly Sticks compete at the WC.  Also the static judges DID NOT like it and didn't score it well, part of the issue was construction complexity.  The full sale is a homebuilt and designed to be very easy to build.  That's great for a homebuilder but not so great for your construction complexity score. I love it and think it's an incredibly clever choice of subject.  

Jack had an issue in the first round where the cylinder of his brand new Saito FG21 came loose and cracked a mounting ear.  A field repair was unsuccessful so his son Mitch took the train to Leeds and was waiting the next day for Leeds Hobby Shop to open.  Mitch made it back quickly and they had the new engine installed and a tank run through in time for Jack to make round 2.  Unfortunately it was entirely too windy for it (like most of our planes) but he did manage to complete the 2nd and 3rd rounds without further incident.

Burkhard Reinsch's (GER) lovely Gypsy Moth.  This is modeled after the plane used in the film "Out of Africa".  As I've shown previously the wings fold up per the full scale.

Per Iverson's (NOR) very bright Super Stearman.  The color scheme really looks good in the sun

David Law's (AUS) Pitts S2B.

Marcus Hausmann's (GER) very colorful Stampe

Bert Van Eijk's (NED)  Bowers Fly Baby 1B. I really liked this one because it's a model of a homebuilt that was made to look like a 1930s mail plane.  It's cute and well done

Mike Barbee's (USA) Hawker Fury.  This was not Mike's first choice plane to bring but it probably worked out better, the Fury did pretty well in the wind and Mike put up some very solid flights.

My plane (and I) had been struggling in the wind during the previous rounds, round 3 was less windy and I was able to fly kind of OK.  Afterwards Danny Fenton (septic) decided it was time for a Solero.  I had never head of a Solero before this comp but it's a vanilla ice cream pop covered with mango, kind of like a mango orangecicle.  He was right, it was time for one.  Here's me, Mika (jlyhami), and Danny in the cafe.  Looks like Danny got the jump on us 

There were a few group pictures I wanted to get while I was there.  The first was of the 3  1/4 scale "flying yacht" type planes.  This is Argyris Giannetakis with his 1938 Ryan SCW, NC18914, Tim Dickey with his 1932 Waco UEC, NC12472, and me with the 1941 Fairchild 24, N66143.  I'll post more of these on my build thread when I get time to post on it.  All 3 of these are scratch built with VERY few purchased parts between the 3 of them.  They also all scored over 900 in static.  The pictures don't do them justice

I got to meet several RCSBers for the first time.  Here's me and Hector Pergamalis (hpergm) with our planes

And I managed to wrangle a few more onto the field.  We were doing this before the last bit of flying, I had to get the people and planes wrangled before the round started.  There is at least one plane missing, Peter Fynn had already packed the Southern Martlet up.  But you can find his build thread HERE  

From left to right Hector (hpergm) and his Ercoupe (build thread), me and the F24 (build thread), Danny Fenton (septic) and his CL/RC Chipmunk (maybe no thread for this particular Chippie?), and John Ranson (johnr) and his Hornet (build thread).  There's another one of these with the great Richard Crapp in it but I don't have it on my phone.  If any of you have one I'd love to see it.

But that's not it, I also managed to snag most of the RCSB members that were in attendance at the banquet.  This was much more difficult to do than I expected and I didn't get everyone.  From left to right is me, Peter Fynn (Peter Fynn),  Angelo Quintrero Guinand (Firehawk), Danny Fenton (septic), Richard Crapp (Richard Crapp), Marcus Hausmann (I don't know his username ), Peter Goff (or his), Klaus Seemann (Scale-Klaus).  I'm missing Mika (jlyhami) and Hector (hpergm) and probably a few others.  Thanks guys for taking some time out of the banquet for this.

I've said it before but without the wonderful community that Mike has created here I would not be in that picture.  It was the exposure to all these amazing modelers who take the time to share their work that set me on the path to be able to participate in something like this.  Thank you Mike for that and your continued support of the team.

Not long after that pic was the drone show that Richard posted the video to.  I had never seen one before and it was very cool

A few more things related to the comp.  The BMFA put out a very nice booklet, amongst other things it had all of the team members

And Graham gave all of the pilots a neat acrylic piece

One of the aspects of the F4 WC that I didn't know about previously was the stickers.  Many of the teams pass out stickers to everyone.  I think there are more but these are the ones that I've found so far

And some of the teams pass out pins.  My hat band is getting a bit full 

Something else I didn't know about was shirt swapping.  This is quite a thing, for me having one of these great modelers ask for my shirt is quite an honor.  Dawn from the British team even took the literal shirt off my back!  Sorry Danny, I didn't notice when I shot this that your name wasn't all the way readable.

And not at all related to the comp but I mentioned that we were heading to see the Shuttleworth collection.  It was amazing and I'm very happy I got to see it.  I'm not really big on WWI planes but seeing real, actual WWI planes that are airworthy was unexpectedly great.  Also smelling them.  As soon as you walk into their hangar you can smell the castor oil.

And I got to fly a very historic Tiger Moth off Old Warden.  I had been warned that the Tiggie wasn't a particularly good flying plane.  While I've flown better flying planes it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe.  And flying one off that airfield was very special.

All right, that's enough for now.  It's time for bed.

Ben

The first is the official BMFA one LINKY

And second is from the Lithuanian competitor Rytis Kalinauskas  LINKY

Ben

Congratulations and thanks for representing the USA so well! 

That's not a terrible assessment of the Tiger Moth.  It did leave the ground much sooner than I expected but it (barely) climbs at 65 and cruises at 85.  Even with headsets and a helmet it was LOUD and hard to communicate with each other, apparently -EI has a shorter exhaust pipe than normal so it's worse than most.  It was very well kept and the engine compartment looked pristine.  But I found the controls poorly harmonized- the elevator was light, the rudder is powerful, and the ailerons are very heavy and maybe just there to keep you from skidding all the turns.  But it was neat and I'm really glad I got to do it.

Ben

I doubt that I would get to fly a Jungman (one seat) the Jungmeister is the two seater.