Today was my RC club's fun fly day. We were supposed to start flying at 9:00, but started late because one guy called in (curses on cell phones everywhere), so we waited. He got in, and the CD said "let's fly!" at 9:20. That's when the wind kicked up. I don't know how windy it was, but it was exceedingly turbulent -- the flying was so bad that after the two minute precision landing contest turned into a "get it on the ground whole" contest we called it a day.
But that's not why I'm writing.
After the picnic the wind calmed down, so I got out my 1/2A control line plane and did a few laps. I finally got the engine running, I was so happy that I did a figure 8 and pancaked it into the ground inverted. It took me about 30 minutes to realize that one of the kids there had just been steeling herself to ask me to let her fly. So I took the pieces out of my trunk, glued it all together, then spent an hour and a half teaching her to fly (thank goodness I had some big props!).
It's the first time I've taught someone to fly from inside the circle -- up until now the only method that ever occurred to me was to just let the plane go and let the student sink or swim. So we learned together, she and I. We broke one prop, but we didn't do any more airframe damage, and by the end of the session she was flying quite well. She never completed a flight -- she got dizzy just as the wind kicked up; she bounced it off the ground just hard enough to stop the engine but not to damage anything. But we all had fun, and I think I left her pretty happy with the idea of flying airplanes.
Topic: Good Day Flying Today (Read 867 times)