Bob Whitney's Free Flight Contest

[Rusty]

Hello Guys:

Today Bob Whitney had his annual free flight contest in Palm Bay, FL.  It was the most beautiful day and turned out to be a great success.  He had at least 50 people attend.  Food was served.   There was hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, chips, desert, etc.   Some of the flights were so good, the planes went out of sight, but were found later with a locator.   It was a very nice event.  Believe it or not, a Stearman put on a full aerobatics show on for us, WITH smoke on.  WOW!!!    BIG thanks to Bob. 

This picture is of launch area.

[Rusty]

Adding picture showing the flight line. 

[Rusty]

Adding picture showing the HUGE field. 

[Rusty]

Adding picture showing a plane in flight. 

[Rusty]

Adding picture showing a contestant with his plane.

[Rusty]

Adding picture of another plane in flight. 

[Rusty]

Adding picture of CD, Bob Whitney.   

[Rusty]

Adding picture of Stearman performing air show. 

[Steve Helmick]

BLANK

Preemptive strike.    Steve

[Dave Hull]

Way to go, RAD!

Those may not have wires on 'em and might be missing a smelly diesel up front, but by golly it looks like model airplanes and builders!

The Divot

[John Park]

Free flight rubber is certainly a great way to go aeromodelling if you've got the space - I did a lot of it in the years when I couldn't get a local C/L flying field, chiefly revisiting some of the kit designs I couldn't get to fly properly when I was a kid.  You may be familiar with Tom Hallman's 'maxfliart' stuff on YouTube - quite enchanting to watch some of those three- and four-minute flights with beautiful little scale models.. 

[EddyR]

 Most of my early contest were ff . At one i was flying a zipper with a K&B 19 in it and a guy comes up to me and talked about the Zipper. It was Carl himself. Big moment for a 17 year old kid.
Edy

[bob whitney]

Adding picture of CD, Bob Whitney.

  almost 300 years of modeling knowledge in this photo

[Trostle]

  almost 300 years of modeling knowledge in this photo

Is that Dave Platt with the white pony tail?  One of the true legends in our model aviation field.  I have been honored to have met him.

Keith

[John Park]

Ah, Dave Platt... great to see that he's still going strong! He was our C/L aerobatics guru in the late 1950s. His Gazelle, a Flite Streak clone for the popular 1 - 1.5cc diesels we all had in 1960, was kitted by KeilKraft and I must have built a dozen of them when I was learning the basic loops, bunts, eights and inverted.  The first was from the kit, the rest from the kit plan with a thicker wing achieved by the Bob Gieseke method - draw round a kit rib (salvaged from the kit model after I'd crashed it beyond repair) with a fat ball-point pen.