About 3 weeks ago I decided to compare  the efficiency of a stunt type airfoil with a simple flat plate. I used two Brodak Baby Clowns. The picture below shows the planes. The red plane is a stock Baby Clown Arf converted to electric power. The blue plane is a Baby Clown frame with a 3/8" foam flat-plate wing cut to the standard outline. The foam wing has a rounded leading edge and about 1" taper at the trailing edge.

Both planes were consecutively flown on 42' lines with Suppo 2212-13 motors, governor speed controls, and 8x8 APC thin E props.

With the governors set to 7,000 rpm the lap time for the plane with the stunt airfoil was 4.0 sec. The flat plate airfoil lap time was 4.5 sec. A few calculations (V = cube root of power) show the poorer performance of the flat plate would require about 42% more power to fly a 4.0 sec lap. Thats quite a difference!

This was not intended to be an in-depth comparison but simply a fun quick test with available airframes.

There is a servo.     I tie my planes to a tripod with a single line and control them RC style from outside the circle. At 68 years old I get too dizzy to fly conventional CL. That time passed about 5 years ago.  

Surprisingly the stunt airfoil plane all-up weight was 10.0 oz and the slab wing 8.5. I attribute this to the covering used on the stock plane. The slab wing plane had no covering. I have a book on Model Airplane Aerodynamics and maximum airspeed is independent of weight in the books equations. The plane stops accelerating when the drag = thrust.

Jim, the speed is at least marginally dependent on weight, since the wing needs a higher angle of attack, generating more drag.  The uncovered foam on the slab wing is probably a big part of the extra load.  Since the power is pretty close to identical(the prop might be slipping a bit more at a slightly slower speed or something else funky), the half a second per lap is a very big difference on the slab plane.

The radio is a neat idea.  Maybe somebody can come up with a way of interfacing a Wii controller to the transmitter so you can just use it like a handle.

I can spin all day counter clockwise but when I flip inverted if I haven't been flying for some period of time it gets me

I thought I was the only person to experience this. 

Sounds like we're all getting a little on the old side! I can also back up the fact that ginger is certainly one of the best cures for motion sickness and interestingly enough, it really helps to prevent migraines as well. I have never liked the taste of ginger at all, but I hate migraines a lot more, and I get the capsules now, so the taste is no problem.

Thanks to Jim for posting the test on such basic models. The round-the-pole system is a neat idea especially with the 1/2A stuff where you spin around so fast.