Muncie Indiana:

The team has been selected:

Josh Ellison, Mark Rudner, and Richard Stubblefield.
There was six-man final in which all but Josh had two losses.  Josh won thereby saving us from further hostilities. 
Alternates include Michael Wilcox, Chuck Rudner, and Andy Minor.

Junior winner: Alexandria Nadine.  There were four juniors of which three were eliminated 0-3 and Alexandria won a match.  There is strong sentiment to revise the program to allow juniors fly each other early and avoid their routine elimination by adults.

Many of the old 1974, 1976, 1977, and 1979 F2d pioneers were in attendance, either competing or helping: George Cleveland, Bob Burch, Charlie Johnson, Greg Hill, Kit Gerhardt, Jordan Segal, Dan Hay, Ron Colombo, Ed Brzys, Mike Hoffeldt, and some others that will either come to me or be added by reply.

Where have all the combat flyers gone?

MUNCIE

There were lots of fliers at the team trials, including the 4 juniors 38 flew.  Something like 120 matches including reflys.  Simply the best F2D flying I have ever seen with lots of hard fought matches, many had 3 min. of actual flying.  I counted a couple matches with 5 cuts, more with 4, and very few 1-0 or airtime wins.  Bob Mears has all the match records, if he ever has time to compile them.

The judging team did fantastic.  Jeff Hannauer marshaled every match. Dave Edwards and Tatyana Leontyev judged every match with help from Steve Stewart, Bob Mears,  Davy Owens, and Larry Scarinzi.  Arlene Pyles and Jan Mears ran the scoring and the pits.  Outstanding job.  With the new program they posted the match cards for every flight so the pilots could see what happened.  I think there was only one protest that was disallowed, but don't hold me to that.

Shutoffs played a big role.  It looked like about 25% of the matches had shutoff problems by one or both pilots and/or one or both planes.  Something like 90% of the shutoffs were swing arms.  A few were variations of line pull shutoffs, and 1 or 2 electronic ones.  There were two, count 'em 2! flyaways- a real compliment to the flying skills.  The shut offs, both swing arms, didn't work, even though they functioned on the ground.  One went a hundred yards or so and the other crashed after a very short flight.

The heat and humidity were killers, but not as bad as in 2012.  The temps never got above 90, 87 officially on Sunday, but it felt close to 100.

Phil C