I happen to be new to this board, but I'm not new to Navy Carrier. I won't bother to try to change anyone's mind about what the Navy Carrier event is today. I would like to clear up a couple of points on some of the comments that have been made.
One of the complaints is that "the event has become too technical .. " . Newsflash - the event has NEVER been anything but 'technical'. Go back to the earliest days of the Navy Carrier event and you will find McCoy .60's, running on pressure with high nitro fuel. The "throttle" was a home-built exhaust slide (or rotor), and a home built fuel meter. When Class 1 was added, K&B and HP rear rotor and other Rat-Race engines were likewise "throttled". This was because the scoring favored high-speed, pretty much above all else. Scale points have always been kind of second-thought. You don't have to document anything except general outlines and even those are never checked. The event was called "Rat Race for blue airplanes", with pretty much the same attitude as it is now called "Prop hanging for MO-1's". When Profile was added, there were no scale points. If you think the MO-1 is ugly, you should see some of the planes flown before the 10 scale points were added to profile. So if you want to fly a scale airplane, in a scale like manner and land it on a model of a carrier deck, go right ahead. You always could, but you wouldn't have been any more competitive with "Old fashioned" carrier than you are in todays "Modern" style.
Secondly, the MO-1 did not come into the event when the scoring change made low-speed more important than the previous method. The MO-1 came into the event because it was a simple box fuselage, of minimal
cross-section, with a shoulder wing (carved from a slab of 1/2" or 3/8" balsa). It was the nearest "scale" design to a rat-racer that anyone could find. It did not prop-hang, in fact it would barely slow down to 30 mph. It had no flaps, so there wasn't any way to slow it much. Didn't matter, since low speed didn't matter much. It was fast. It happened that, when the scoring DID change to make low-speed more important, the MO-1 was one of the easier prototypes to change into a prop-hanging, leadout-sliding freak-show. I'm kidding - I personally fly a profile MO-1. So sue me .. :-). In fact, prop-hanging flight was pioneered by Dave Wallick, and I don't remember him flying anything but Guardians.
And lastly, the Skyray was not picked as a "beginners" carrier plane. Skyray carrier was added to the Sig contest because Mike Pratt wanted an event that pushed Sig kits. It was the 2nd Sig contest that had events other than Stunt, so it was 24 years ago. I remember Mike commenting that he specifically designed the Skyray wing structure to allow room for a 3-line bellcrank and the ability to adjust the leadout position. I was there when that conversation took place. So comments about the "Stock" leadout position are not really relevant to the design criteria or the rules as they were originally envisioned. Whether it makes a good carrier plane or not is really not relevant, but we do the best we can with it, because it's Sig's contest. Sig wrote the rules and Sig continues to maintain the rules that are used, although there is nothing preventing anyone running a contest from changing anything about them. They are merely one variation of a "local rules" event.
Mike A.