F3A World Championships

[proparc]

Tetsuo Onda won the 2017 F3A World Aerobatic Championships held November 2017, flying a ship with the new YS 200 Supercharged engine. The plane and engine cut thru the extreme high winds like a knife thru butter!! He beat 6X World Champion, Christophe Paysant Leroux into second place.

[Bob Hunt]

Tetsuo Onda won the 2017 F3A World Aerobatic Championships held November 2017, flying a ship with the new YS 200 Supercharged engine. The plane and engine cut thru the extreme high winds like a knife thru butter!! He beat 6X World Champion, Christophe Paysant Leroux into second place.

So what you are saying is that Tesuo has to win five more in a row to accomplish what Christophe has done... 

Bob Hunt

[proparc]

So what you are saying is that Tesuo has to win five more in a row to accomplish what Christophe has done... 

Bob Hunt

No.   But, I know you are heavily involved in cutting edge RC things, and you know in F3A, the prevailing thinking is that if your not electric, you better go home. Onda literally blew them out of the sky. Now granted, a supercharged 200 Dingo, you pretty much would need one of the electric motors from the Hoover Dam to match that thing but, it still won! But, Onda had to go up against the BEST computer controlled Contra Drives in the world today, and he still blew them away.

[Curare]

Power wasn't the issue. The electric motors that everyone are using can easily rival a YS, and probably exceed it straight off the charger.

The big issue was the wind, and BATTERIES. If you know the F3A rules, electric aircraft are weighed with batteries in and have a max weight of 5000g. IC engines are weighed with the tank dry. so effectively you can have as big a tank as you like on an IC ship, but you're limited when flying electric.

Having flown F3A with electrics, it does become a matter of economy, if you blast through all your battery power in the first half of the schedule, you're going be weak for the second. Flying in wind makes it worse, and basically electrics were caught out.

If you think that everyone is going to jump ship from electrics back to IC, you're sorely mistaken. All it would have taken is for Onda to pop an injector, or had something in his fuel, or have the CDI unit come unplugged or any other myriad of things that can go wrong with a YS and the story would have been different.

[Bob Hunt]

Curare has made the point that is also one of the main problems with our AMA rules concerning stunt models. The electric powered models have to be weighed with the battery on board, while the glow powered models get to be weighed without fuel on board. The glow model's takeoff weight is more than it was at weigh-in, so shouldn't it have to be weighed at "takeoff weight" just as an electric model is? Fuel weighs nominally an ounce per fluid ounce, so the actual takeoff weight of a glow model could be as much as 8 ounces more than it is with an empty tank. That's half a pound. Give the electric crowd an 8 ounce (or even 7 or 6 ounce...) reprieve (or leveling of the playing field) and see what happens. Most electric ships would then come in under 64 ounces, and hence be able to use thinner lines.

Let's level the playing field across the board for both CL and RC usage of electric power versus glow.

Bob Hunt

[proparc]

The issue was not that everyone is or should jump ship back to I.C. in F3A. The point was that EVERYONE in F3A, touted that you HAD to have an electric to get it done. YOU DON'T!! Piston power CAN AND still is getting done! Big Time!!

[Bob Hunt]

Okay, Milt, point taken (although not "everyone" in F3A is convinced that you Have to fly electric). How about addressing the elephant in the room (and I chose elephant instead of gorilla because of the weight difference...) about the disparity between takeoff weights in glow versus electric. If the glow guys (using any engine) had to meet the same weights as the electrics have to, then the outcome would be very different indeed. Add half a pound or more to the glow weigh-in (or simply weigh them with a full tank of fuel on board) and see which type would fair better in the wind. Level the field and then let's talk.

Bob Hunt

[john e. holliday]

Sounds like rules proposal time.  I would go with weighing IC plane with fuel load.   Of course I don't think I have a plane with any thing bigger than 5 ounce tank.  Most are 4.5 ounce.  Lately with going to 25 size plane its even less fuel on board.   I might go electric if I didn't have so much tied up in IC planes and engines.