Yes, my Open plane is now purple with my zig zag flames. I got a 13 on appearance last year, so I did a quick 3 day paint job on my 5 year old plane to try to improve my score on the theory that "shiny" is better. It scored a 16 at appearance, same as my brother Wayne's plane, though Wayne's has far fewer flaws (as in hundreds). Guess there is something to say about shiny, though I personally would never have scored it the same as Wayne's, shiny or not. Of course, I have looked at both for many hours, Appearance Judges only had one minute to look at each plane this year.
We had very little practice before the Nats- I was painting mine - hinged up the control surfaces Thursday evening around 10:00PM and we left at 6:00AM Friday morning. We both flew well (better than we had been practicing) and were both in the hunt for Top Twenty heading into Thursday. We made a lot of progress this week trimming the planes and figuring out how to reduce battery consumption. I was only 3 points out of 5th and Wayne was about 9 points out of 5th on his circle at the end of Wednesday. The "shiny" came back and bit me in the ass on Thursday. My plane was a "porkified" 75 ounces with the new paint job at weigh in and I ended up hurting my shoulder a bit flying it on Sunday. Don't think my shoulder can really take planes at that weight any more, guess I'm not getting any younger. Shoulders still popping and crackling today. Both our planes were flying better than ever, just can't say the same for the pilots.
Mark Mckinney and I likely would not have even been in the hunt on our circle if Kenny Stevens had not crashed his plane on his first official flight. Tom Dixon made the Top 20, which made me very happy, though he likely would not been in the hunt on his circle had Richard Oliver not crashed his beautiful Maverick on the grass circles just before qualifying started. Dead air got them both and both were the top vote getters for the Concourse award (Kenny won Concourse). The Nats is the Nats - misfortune can and will strike even some of the best at the most inopportune times. My friend Derek Barry found this out first hand last year.
Qualifying was extremely hard and the flying especially excellent this year. Wayne probably did the best job on his circles between the two of us (no top flyer crashed a plane on his circle). I really don't know where the final placing ended up. The scoreboard noted those who had qualified, but didn't have final order by the time we left. It was baking hot and we just needed to get out of the sun. Wayne flew his best flights on Thursday and I flew my best on Wednesday. I had two magnificent landings on Wednesday and bounced both on Thursday (along with quite a few other errors). Mark McKinney also flew the pants off his Crusader on Thursday - he ended up winning the Rookie of the Year Award. Lol, as an aside, I also had to throw my second flight of Wednesday out after my brain reverted to "Old Time" mode. Drat.
Wayne and I did place 10th and 11th in Old Time with our electric Ringmasters. They flew magnificently with very high maneuver scores - good enough to put us in the running for a high placing, but Old Time and Classic were once again moved to the L-Pad and darned if we have yet to figure out how to land them on asphalt. Might help if we had an asphalt circle to practice on, but I was still pleased with the result.
It was an extremely fun Nats because of the great job Dennis Adamisin and his crew did. NO MORE PING PONG BALLS. Computerized randomly generated flight orders. We were out of the Pilots meeting in an hour and Sparky also did a great job at Appearance Judging as the planes were ready for viewing immediately after the Pilots Meeting. One minute per plane. Like Heaven. Banquet was moved to Friday evening so we actually were able to attend our first one after all these years. The banquet was awesome and may be even better next year as I think they are kicking around moving it to Monday evening after Appearance Judging. All in all, despite the final result for Wayne and I, we performed as well as could be expected and the NATS experience was certainly much improved for me this year.
Congrats to all the winners and special thanks to Dennis and his entire crew for making this another great Nats to remember.
Jim Smith
Topic: 2016 Nats - A Contestants View (Read 3631 times)