Bob's my hero.
He flies anything really well, and is a super trimmer. The way he can adapt to bad conditions is pretty well known.
One of the best I have ever seen was at the '92 Nats in Chickopee, Mass when he made the fly-off with the four year old Showtime Laser.
The Saturday Walker Trophy Fly-Off was really hot and humid. The air was dead. The way that it was stacking up was that the Laser was too heavy to be competitive because the Super Tigre 60 was not powerful enough to get it through the atmospheric conditions with any kind of snap. In fact on the first flight he dragged the rudder on the ground in the second outside loop (but they all seemed right on top of one another, the other two must have been close)!
Bob set his mind to work on the problem and figured if the pipe motors can have small displacement and make enough power to haul big models with RPM, then the 60 can produce the power to haul the Laser by an increase in R's. This created an interesting set-up for the 60. Competitor Brian Eather suggested a 12x4 three blade to wind up the Tigre yet keep it in the airspeed range, with a lot of (Bob's favorite ingredient) nitro for this "more power" experiment.
Bob was up and needled the Tigre so that it sounded like the prop was near what the tuned pipes were making RPM-wise, but the engine was grunting through the muffler with a pretty quiet pounding. The model was off and cruising well, Bob hammered that Laser as hard as it would take, and amazingly it would accelerate out of the corners with authority. In fact it was good enough for him to push the big boys around. He eventually bested Bob Hunt for fourth.
Bob continues to be my coach and the words he told me the first time I asked him for help still stay with me, "Sure I'll help you, as long as you try to do what I tell you. When you stop listening, were done". Typical no-nonsense Whitely, straight to the point. No apologies.
Maybe later I can write some RJ controller stories. He was a famous, and very good LA Approach controller.
Chris...