Control Line: Racing
Bill Lee
This column will be in your hands sometime either late in November or early December, just in time to start thinking of the Christmas-time events. The contest season is over in many places for several months. Winter is the time that we all should be spending getting everything together for next year. Of course, we all spend our winters profitably that way, don't we? Some parts of the country are not blessed with that great and glorious season called "building season"; some people now have to fly all year around. Poor people! They just don't know what they are missing by having to be inside while the weather on the outside is so awful!
One of those areas without a real building season is the great Southwest — Arizona and Southern California. Why, they are so hard up that they have to go and have contests in January! Can you imagine that? January! And not just little, rinky-dink contests. They put on the Southwestern Regional Championships in Buckeye, Arizona (Phoenix, for all of you who can't find Buckeye on the map). Buckeye is known for many things, among them some very good competition — racing as well as stunt and carrier. They even have some strange airplanes floating around with no wires on them: free flights, or something. I really don't know about airplanes with no wires. Are they safe?
Anyway, Buckeye also has some other notable features. There is a little steak house — I'm pretty sure the name is the Cattle Rustler. If you get to Buckeye and eat supper anywhere else while you're there, well, you just don't know what you've missed. In addition to the great food, you'll find a whole bunch of crazy model airplane fliers there on any night that the Southwesterners are running. Good food, good bull-throwing with other fliers. What more could you want?
Some people seem to want more, like a good controversy or two thrown in for measure. Buckeye really has been the focal point for controversies during the last year. It just seems that you can go and make up a real neato-keeno set of rules for an event and then, goodness, here come the bad guys to screw it up. Why, they go out and just really try and get good at it! And when they do, the poor folk who want the event to stay simple just get blown away and... well, there is your controversy. Too bad the original rules weren't better set out; maybe the event could have stayed the way the originators intended it. I mean, even the AMA events have a bad habit of being that way. Look at Slow Rat, for example.
Anyway, Buckeye is the place to be in January if you want to race. They have all the AMA events for those who are into that, as well as some really fine local events and FAI team race. Look up this contest in the Competition Newsletter in Model Aviation for particulars. How better to spend a winter vacation than in the sunny Southwest at Phoenix in January? As far as I know...
Junior Problem?
One of the recurring themes that I see in the modeling press is the so-called "junior problem." And while I truly believe that more could be done to encourage youngsters in model aviation, I wonder just how much good encouragement does.
I have two children. My daughter, Angie, is soon-to-be 11 and my son, Kristopher, will be eight right after Christmas. As you can expect, they have been exposed most of their lives to a steady diet of model airplanes. And yet, neither one of them can fly for themselves. I have chosen not to push either one of them into flying, feeling that when the time is right, one or both will show some interest and start into flying. But it seems the time has come.
This past year I have gone to quite a few contests around the country. Most of the time my family has gone, too. The District VIII contests are particular treats for the family, as we've made quite a lot of good friends from as far away as New Orleans and Dallas/Fort Worth. And the one thing that has really marked this year of competition has been the number of junior fliers that have emerged. Typically, these have been sons of fliers working with Daddy, using some of his old equipment, but also building new stuff, too. And some of these teams are really starting to do quite well.
Some examples:
- Mike and Randy Wheeler from Mesquite, Texas, up near Dallas. Randy is eight this year and has been flying for only a little over a year, but is really getting good. He and Mike went to Winston-Salem this summer and walked away with a lot of gold, and they repeated that at several other contests later in the summer.
- Ed Moorman and his stepson, Chad Stewart, from Elgin AFB, Florida. Ed reports: "Just returned from the District V meet in Jacksonville and the guys from the panhandle did very well. Chad and I took 1-2 in Florida Slow Rat. One of our other members, Norm Faith, took third. In AMA, the O.S.s and S.B.'s all had pit trouble — they were all trying chicken-hopper tanks. I managed the first with my K&B .35 Super Slow plane in 7:20. We also ran third with Chad's plane in 8:17. We won Mouse Class I on a windy afternoon with a woefully long time. No one showed up for Fast Rat so we ran the Juniors in it with their profiles. Chad won in 7:49. Jimmy Faith, Norm's boy, was third. I'm sort of leading a one-man crusade to get the guys here into racing. From just Chad and I we have six men (three father-son teams) and maybe two others. Not too bad."
- Jim and Timmy Ong from Alexandria, Louisiana, and George and Mitchell Cleveland from Kenner, Louisiana — other father-son teams that are beginning to make their presence felt.
When you get to a contest and see a half dozen or so junior fliers with Daddy helping out in the pit, you get kind of excited about what the future can bring. It's this kind of display that leads your own progeny on with the "if he can do it, so can I" type of resolve that is just now being displayed by my own son, Kris. Well, we have a new 1/2A Flite Streak and a Cox Black Widow, and we did go out yesterday and flew it. OK, the first few flights weren't blazing successes. I had forgotten how dizzy you can get out there. But the desire is there now, and I'm sure not going to try and stop it.
This leads me back to the original words on this topic. I wonder if programs aimed at kids who really aren't interested to start with will ever succeed. I wonder if the future of model aviation isn't in the hands of the fathers who are now themselves active. Is there any way that we can extract model airplane flying from the toy phase and put it into the hobby phase? If a kid doesn't have some interest to start with, will mere encouragement make this anything more than a toy — a passing thing to play with for only a short time, only to be laid aside like so many other Christmas gifts?
Sure is good to see the Dads bringing out their "junior problem."
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
