From one of the "greats", with 11 PC WINS Peter Mazur-
Hi Louis,
I have enjoyed your Stunthanger discussions and figure I owe you comments on this thread and others. I have been slowed down by a retina detachment but the surgery and recovery have been going well so I can see pretty well again and don't have to spend my days and nights holding my head in awkward positions. Now, let me get to your questions.
I started flying Carrier in 1967. I was a grad student at Northwestern University at the time and a founding member of the local Lake Shore Radio Control at the time. I was not in any control line club at that time and didn't know any local control line guys. I bought a Sturdy-Built Mauler kit and built it for a K&B .40 R/C front intake, the same kind of engine I was using in R/C at the time. I finished it and took it to my parents home in Fargo, ND, for a summer vacation. Every evening I took it to the local F M Skylarks control line field and flew it. I grew up in Fargo and was a founding member of the Skylarks and had many friends there. (Still do, and I try to go back every year for their annual contest, this year being the 60th. I'll be there.) nobody in Fargo was into carrier yet. I worked a lot with Paul Kegel, now a well-known Carrier flier and event director at the Fargo contest, to get this airplane working and to practice flying. Paul and I drove his GTO to the big contest in Minneapolis to compete against real experts in Carrier. I had achieved a dead-reliable engine run, decent high speed performance given the limits of the engine, and reliable flight performance thanks to all the practice, nearly four weeks of flights most evenings. I managed to win first place in Class 1 and I was hooked. Paul was hooked, too, and went onto build his own carrier models.
I continued with the Mauler in competition, following up with an Airabonita and then a Don Gerber MO-1, always in Class 1. By the 1970's I was in New York, working and then living on Long Island. I got to fly in contests in the New York-New Jersey area and occasionally Pennsylvania, met a lot of nice Carrier guys, and got better at this. Still only an R/C club to fly with, so not much Carrier flying except at contests. But I won my share. I built MO-1s for Class I and Class II, took them to the 1975 Nats in Lake Charles and took 1st in Class II and 2nd in Class I, my First Nats trophies. I have been at every Nats since then. Notice I have not mentioned Profile yet. I didn't fly profile. But in 1978, the NCS was new and gave a very nice pewter plate to the overall high-point-total, the Eugene Ely Award. (Of course I liked the plate: I bought it and had it engraved, so it reflected my tastes. I was NCS president for its first 12 years.) Anyway, in order to win this plate, one needed the points that came from each class and I had never flown Profile. So before the 1979 Nats, I decided to build a GS Bearcat profile and powered it with a Tune-Hill .35, an engine based on a slow rat version of the OS .40 FSR. I made the first test flight at the 1979 Lincoln Nats, won 2nd place and won Class I and II and my first Eugene Ely award. I continued to fly Profile after that, although my favorites were still Class I and II. (Although you counted 10 1st in Profile, I checked and it is 11.)
The Bearcat was a reliable airplane and very fast. But the rules had changed for 1977 to give more points for low speed and people were learning that it made a difference. Dick Davis was hanging a Profile Carrier version of, I believe, a Mongoose. Dave Wallick won the 1980 Ohio Nats with about four minutes of hanging low speed, setting a new record and a new standard for Profile low speed flight. I managed to win Profile once more with the Bearcat in Reno in 1984 but it was time for something with a better low speed. I built a Leroy Cordes Spearfish and flew that for years, winning in 1988-1990 with it. My third Profile was an original MO-1 design flown 1992-2008. (I didn't have a lot of building time so I tended to stretch a model as long as possible. This one had a solder joint fatigue in 2008 and finally died.) My MO-1 won four 1sts, seven 2nds and two 3rds, and it held the profile record for a very, very long time. All but the last win were using old Tune-Hill engines, a design from the 70's. Eventually I switched to the Nelson Combat and I am still using that. After the MO-1 crash I needed a new profile model. I started building a modified Brodak Guardian (design by Bill Calkins) one week before the 2009 Nats. That was a good choice and it won in 2009-2011. I wrote the design details for Hi-Lo-Landings in the summer of 2009 and Gary Hull put it in Control Line World. I recommend this model highly for it's really good calm weather low speed, due to its thick airfoil. Thin airfoils seem to do better in windier conditions than the Guardian.
The simpler answer to your question as to how I won lots of Nats events is actually a lot simpler than all this might indicate: I worked pretty hard at Carrier and flew in a lot of contests. In the old days I could get to 10-12 contests a year and that kept me pretty sharp. There aren't that many around any more, sadly.
Carrier flyers are dying out, literally, and we are not picking up young people as fast as we lose old ones. This is pretty obvious. But, are there any rules changes that would help? I don't think there is a magic bullet here. There is always talk of getting rid of hanging on low speed, but that is a pretty drastic change that would obsolete present equipment and consequently lose some of the present flyers who won't want to rebuild their fleet. There are unofficial events, such as Skyray and Northwest Sport .40, that people are enjoying, but I think one of the reasons for that may be that they are, indeed, unofficial and are low, fun-type events. Making them official would mess that up. We do have Sportsman Profile Carrier which is popular in some parts of the country but not held in others. We always have it around here, without regard for how many contestants we are expecting. I wish more places would do that. We have Sportsman at the Nats every year, even though turnout is pretty low. I guess Sportsmen don't travel cross country to fly, but they might show up at local contests. Even the occasional stunt flyer might be interested in giving it a try if the local club will lend him a plane. We have had that happen, and I know Bill Bischoff kept "the Mule" that anybody could.
I have been pushing the Electric Carrier events. I and several others, including Eric Conley and John Vlna, think this is an improvement and are willing to switch most of our flying to Electric. Lots of places don't have contests including Electric. The rules were written to try to keep the scores for gas and electric close together. I have been working pretty hard on electric and can't get my Electric scores up to my corresponding gas scores, but they are close enough that I can compete in most local contests. I might go to more contests if they held combined events.
A good reason to support Electric is that this is the present and future technology for most R/C modelers. They are comfortable with the technology and it is easier for many of them to learn how to set up an electric system than a gas system. And the cost for Electric continues to drop, so that is not a barrier. So I am hoping for more R/C guys to give Carrier a try. I've met a few, but it's too early to know if this will help. I don't think it will hurt, though, and it's worth a try.
It would be nice if the barriers to beginning competition were lower, as they are in Stunt, for example. You can buy an ARF or an ARC that will allow you to compete, within your own ability, at all but the highest level of competition. If newcomers to Carrier (or more seasoned competitors who don't have time or inclination to build) had a decent model available with good flight characteristics, they might be willing to give it a try. Sadly, I have no answer as to how to make such an ARF available. At least we have a Brodak kit available everywhere (Guardian) that is fairly simple, and, with a few trivial modifications, can fly very well and win a lot of contests.
So, I have no easy solution that brings in lots of new competitors, just a few simple things that might help around the edges, like making the Sportsman event available everywhere. Perhaps the Electric events will help, too. Invite more people to your local contest and your local club, a simple act that can help every event.
Pete
I will keep posting them as they come in.
LM
Topic: PC Design, Wins, History ? (Read 12440 times)
