Free Flight
Duration
Bob Meuser
New Kid on the Block
We have a new man on the Free Flight: Duration team — Harry Murphy of the CIA. Beginning next month you'll be reading Harry's thoughts on a regular basis; I'm going to take life a little easier. Harry Murphy has edited the newsletter CIA Informer for several years, and it's one of the top one or two such publications in the country. I think he's done a bang‑up job and I'm confident he'll do very well in his new assignment for Model Aviation.
I hope you realize that the "CIA" of which Harry is a member is the real CIA — the Central Indiana Aeromodelers.
I've decided to ease off because I have always written about the things I like to write about, and I won't (and can't) write about anything else. I'm not a pro who can turn out innocuous copy on any assigned topic. Fortunately, there has not been a great mismatch between what I've written for Model Aviation and what my editors have wanted. However, I find it increasingly difficult to find the time to write even the stuff I enjoy, and I don't like to fill this column with lengthy quotes from newsletters and personal correspondence simply to fill space. The space devoted to Free Flight in the modeling magazines is precious and deserves to be well spent.
So I hollered "Help!" and Harry Murphy came to the rescue. I trust you'll be happy with his work—I always have been. I haven't hung up the old jock strap for good; I'll still be yacking at you about every second month.
Please remember that I'm not dead yet! Send items of interest and photos to Bob Meuser, 4200 Gregory St., Oakland, CA 94619.
Joined‑wing concept, again
We discussed the joined‑wing concept in the January, March, and August issues. I'm bloody well sick of it and absolutely will not mention it again for a month or two. Several readers have called my attention to the similarity between Wolkovitch's "joined‑wing" concept and G. Woll's flying‑model version of the Warren‑Young Skycar described in the 1957–58 edition of Frank Zaic's Model Aeronautic Yearbook (available from AMA Supply and Service). Just thought I'd pass that on.
I keep telling you guys that everything worth knowing has already been published in one or another of Zaic's Yearbooks. All we've done since is polish the chrome... (So why do you keep reading this dumb column?)
My dissertation on "An Essay on Rules"
I'm sticking this item here because I don't know where else to put it (although I'm sure I'll get several suggestions from readers). I think the publisher should have put this item on the cover — it deserves it because it is (a) important and (b) applicable to all aspects of aeromodeling. (However, the publisher has this weird notion about color photos of pretty girls holding little airplanes.)
"An Essay on Rules" addresses one of the most important subjects I can think of: how we competition‑oriented modelers spend our spare time—unless you figure that eating, sleeping, and working are the only important things in life. The rules by which we fly, after all, govern that activity.
The following material is extracted from a monograph by David Erbach, entitled "An Essay on Rules, with Special Reference to Ornithopters." It came as a response to my request for ideas on updating the present AMA Ornithopter rules. This column is not the right place to get into the nitty‑gritty of the Ornithopter rules, so I've deleted the parts of the essay specific to that class. (Send a SASE — self‑addressed, stamped envelope — for a copy of David's complete article.)
I have retained everything that applies to the general philosophy of rulemaking. It is the best thing I've seen on the subject; then again, it's virtually the only thing I've ever seen on the subject. That probably sounds like one of my typical smarty‑pants remarks, but it points up one of our problems: we tend to get embroiled in the nitty‑gritty of specific modeling events without thinking very much about the big picture. The difference between those two things is about the same as the difference between a bunch of trees and a forest. Enough! David Erbach: over to you!
An Essay on Rules
Writing good rules to regulate our hobby is extraordinarily difficult, as anyone who has tried it will testify. Why should this be so? Model airplanes are, after all, basically simple, and the people who fly them are not generally the ideologues who trouble much of public life. Nonetheless, to write good rules is extraordinarily difficult.
In general, the rules that govern AMA events are of two types. There are the rules of classification, which define the events, and there are the rules of procedure, which prescribe how the event is to be flown. The procedural rules tend to be noncontroversial. Disputes arise from the classification rules, and it is these whose nature this essay explores.
I think that the problem lies with the essence of classification rules. They have a dual nature which requires them simultaneously to promote and to limit the builder's freedom. There is something contradictory in this, and when rules do go wrong, frequently the problem can be traced to a lack of recognition of — and an awareness of — that duality.
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
