John,
I heard you were third in Sport Scale in your first contest, Man!! Great job.
Got pictures?
Chris...
Wow - What a learning experience and what FUN! It all started Friday night at the motel. I got sick as a dog and threw it all up. No I wasn’t drinking. I think it was a combination of a cold coming on, to much to eat, and nerves. The good news is that I felt good after that. Saturday’s contest weather couldn’t have been better. Clear, not so hot, and almost no wind. The morning was scale judging and went well. The first time contest gremlins started to crop up when it was time to fly. On my first flight attempt my motor started and would quit. I figured it was a bad plug. A change of plug did not fix the problem so I retreated to the sideline to fix the problem. It turned out to be trash in the needle valve. With that fixed I returned to the ring for a flight. This time the motor ran but the airplane would not roll. Every time I advanced the throttle she would try and tip over forward instead of rolling. I was down to my last attempt so I gave it full up to hold the tail down and jammed the throttle wide open. Let there be no doubt that a ST G90 has mussel. The airplane jumped off the runway and away we went. The ten mandatory laps went smoothly at ½ throttle. I then did some fast high laps and some slow laps. But the great part of the flight was the fast laps with smoke. Man she was smoking and pulling like crazy. As it turns out I had a busted wheel that didn’t want to turn. SO the landing was sloppy and short and I defiantly did not do my taxi lap.
The good news is that my Extra 300S is still in one piece. All of my problems are easily fixed. The head judge gave me some pointers on what to fix to improve my scale score. This baby flies great and with a little practice will score very high in flight. I didn’t really get names and I am bad to remember names but I am sure you will recognize most of people in the pictures to follow. To sum it up, I had fun, I learned a lot, I am hooked on scale and I will be back!!! Thanks to all for a great day and a great contest. (And yes the trophy is cool!).