First time I'd seen a Skylark:
circa 1976-77. My family had just returned from another over sea's tour of duty (England-RAF Wethersfield) and had landed at Pease AFB, Portsmouth NH, for my fathers final base tour before his retirement out of the airforce. My older brother (by two years) and I were very much into c/l models having earned our wings on all manner of .049 stuff, Jr. Ringmasters and finally Ringmaster Seniors. On what would be the last flight in England of my brother K&B Stallion .35 powered Ringmaster I had inadvertently stepped on the outboard wing while trying to save it from hitting a parking lot curb during the landing roll out. Once in NH we rebuilt the wing and began flying again at the local elementary school playground about five mins walk from the house. In hindsight I can now see that the broken wing of the Ringmaster actually enabled it to be packed and it survived the transit from England to the States.
As per normal, the sound of a model airplane engine running brought all manner of spectator to the playground to watch. Within min's of the engine start two other adults showed up to watch and mentioned that they also were dabbling in c/l .049 models and were working on a .15 powered plane. Rich and Rob are the names I sort of remember. Rich was a avionics tech of some sort. They both were married and had young kids. I was to be a senior in high school. My brother would be working his first full time job. On the second outing another Sgt showed up in his work fatigues and mentioned that he had a couple planes and would we mind if he came out and flew with us as he did not know of anybody else that was into this stuff. No problem says me and brother. This fellow we only ever knew as "Chuck" or Sgt Chuck. Planes that he flew at the time were a Dumas A-7 Corsair II. The jet styled carrier comp model. Chuck did not build it to carrier spec and simply flew it as a sport stunt model. He also had a Goldberg P-40 and was working on a Skylark. All his models were quick builds with minimal finishing technique and covered 100% in MonoKote, normally only a single color was used. The surfaces were sanded (I think?) but only in so far as to enable the covering to go down somewhat smoothly. Fuselage edges were rare to never rounded off as this would make covering somewhat harder I guessed. We were later joined by another father son team who's names I forget. The dad built and his son (maybe 10 or 12years old at the time) did the flying. His dad liked to cover his models in silk. He built a nice Cosmic Wind in black as I recall. There was also a Capt. that flew his models a few times with us. Capt had a beautiful Dumas P-51 full fuselage stunter that was amazing to watch. It flew so slow that we wondered how the heck it stay'd in the air. My brother and I had no idea what a 4-2-4 run was at the time as we only every ran his K&B and my Fox-35 (Shoestring power) at near full tilt. Anyway..we had a small group that seemed to meet after dinner on any night that the weather was good enough to fly.
Chuck finally finished the Skylark and brought it out to the school yard. I remember being amazed at how large it was with only a Fox -35 in the nose. It was finished in all black in keeping with Chucks semi-quick build and finish techneques. It filed the back of his Pymouth Volare stationwagon. (Chuck was married and had a couple young ones too). Normal was for the adult members to simply drive right out onto/into the school yard and pull up and park 10 or 20 feet from the pit area. So on this particular afternoon that is exactly the way things were, cars all lined up in a row. Chuck fired the engine on the Skylark and I let it go at the drop of his hand. The model seemed to labor as it slowly rolled along the rough grass before finally getting airborne. Chuck, I'd have to say, was the best pilot (other than the Capt) that I'd ever seen, because he could do inside and outside loops and fly inverted (something I could not do yet). So with the new bird airborne and making very slow laps Chuck went into his normal stunt routine, seemingly undaunted by the rather lack luster airspeed of the Skylark. I forget if it was at the top of a wing-over or the top of a inside loop or the recovery from inverted where it happened but...at some point the lines went totally slack and the Skylark was making tracks across the circle with the lines basically dragging on the ground. Chuck did his best to simply run in the opposite direction in a lame attempt to get the slack out of the lines. The Skylark may have been about 25 feet off the ground as it cut the circle in two,..they , the plane and Chuck, passed each other near the mid point of the circle. He held the handle behind his right shoulder (as you might when running to get a kite airborne) and ran full tilt for the other side of the circle never once looking at the plane. So at one point they are both getting closer to each other , pilot and plane, and the next moment they are moving away from each other in opposite directions. I remember the beginning of a cringe as I was thinking on what was about to happen. Visions of the control system being torn out of the plane as the lines suddenly went tight. Well nope, the controls never got ripped out of the plane, nope, far from it. The handle got ripped out of Chucks hand instead! Because he had full "up" dialed in as he ran, when the lines went tight, the Skylark actually pulled out of it's diving arch and aimed skyward. It was at this critical juncture that the handle was snatched from Chucks grip (no lanyard in use, "what the hecks that?"). When he lost the handle Chuck turned and stared as the Skylark began a beautiful climb out back to altitude tracking the normal flight circle again, the handle bouncing along the ground and then airborn at five or six feet high, then another bounce off the ground and another six feet into the air would go the handle. In the pits we all watched and then ran as the Skylark tracked towards the pits and our other planes on the ground and the cars parked behind us. What to save?..the cars or the planes? Well the Skylark gracefully arch over the pits and the cars at about 20 feet high with the handle and lines bouncing now and again off the ground. It did approximately a complete lap of the circle and then just about landed with only a slight bump which killed the motor and broke a prop. Nice airplanes them Skylarks.! I never saw the plane again after that. Not sure what happened to these guys we flew with.
Topic: Skylark kit (Read 4151 times)
