As they say in the Northwest, April showers bring May showers. We set out Friday morning among said showers to the Northwest Regionals in Roseburg, Oregon. We took the geriatric Honda van, rather than the Prius, because we had two stunt planes and two sets of ground support equipment, supporting both an electric and an acoustic stunter. Well, not quite a complete set of acoustic-stunter GSE. My plan was to buy a starting battery and wire it up along the way. This sorta worked, but every time I stopped to work on the wiring, I got drenched by one of the May showers. Holiday weekend traffic and the lack of an adaptive cruise control made it a long and arduous journey.
The acoustic stunter in question was Gordan Delaney's famous Pathfinder Two profile twin. I can't fly it at my electric-only home field, so I planned to get to Roseburg early Friday to get the finicky .15s working. I didn't get there early enough, but did get in a couple partial flights, losing a little blood reminding myself to start the left engine first. The Profile event was Saturday, following Classic. I was hoping I could sneak in some more flights in the morning during Classic. No joy, because they were flying Scale on the other circle. A couple of guys had very cool scale SR-71s. Paul Gibeault, the Banjock of the West, installed a rocket engine in his, which was most entertaining.
My first round Profile flight started out great. Gordan's airplane is easy to fly good stunt with, and I was flying some mighty good stunt. Too bad an engine went bad in the triangles. The resultant 300-something score was not going to suffice. Then, with my homies' help, I cleaned out and leak-checked all the plumbing, tightened and fiddled with everything, and ran a tank of fuel through both engines while walking up and down the flight line annoying the Varsity, who were now practicing stunt on the Scale circle. To my delight, both engines ran fine throughout my second flight and even quit at the right time. Air and airplane were perfect, so I couldn't help winning the event. I displayed the grace and humility in victory characteristic of the Jive Combat Team.
Real stunt was Sunday. Mark Scarborough volunteered to warm up the judges, but I hadn't gotten any practice in on my real stunt plane, so I shoved him out of the way and did the warmup flight, which was kinda interesting, because my mind was still adjusted to the Pathfinder's handle setting.
I have been hanging with the Varsity, learning their ways and lore. One piece of lore I learned this weekend was the Regionals Curse, to wit that nobody who wins the Regionals goes on to win the Nats the same year. I'm not a superstitious man, but I sandbagged enough to ensure I had a chance at the Nats. Paul won with his--um--interesting looking new airplane. David was second. Chris Cox was third, a placing he announced to me accompanied by a sticking out of his tongue. You are probably wondering what we did about Brett. I have been worrying about his reciprocating on whatever form of sabotage we conduct, so I tried to come up with something I could do to him that he could not do back to me. I thought the solution was rather clever: I peed in his fuel.
Topic: Northwest Regionals (Read 7320 times)
