After nearly 6 months of building, I have finally completed my Allegro-Lite sailplane! I started at the beginning of November last year, and just this week finished it up. It’s a great feeling to finally get something like this done, and just in time for soaring season! To celebrate, I have started cleaning up my shop downstairs to make way for the ship I’m going to use for the Louisville Area Soaring Society’s Speed 400 F5J Electric Sailplane Competition coming up in August.

Anyway, back to the Allegro-Lite — it’s a really cool plane, from a completely nerdy point of view. You see — most “competitive” (meaning “efficient”) model sailplanes these days are really expensive — they involve things like hi-load foam, Kevlar, carbon-fiber, and generally a lot of expensive composite materials. Those materials can make things really strong, and yet really light — which is something you need for a really efficient wing on a plane. Well — the Allegro-Lite is an exception because A) it’s made from wood with some carbon fiber (not terribly expensive, B) it is really light and C) despite the previous two things, it is REALLY strong! The design is completely free to the public (courtesy of Dr. Mark Drela from MIT), and there are plenty of other Drela-devotees around to offer help, and in the case of the Allegro-Lite, a near-complete walkthrough. I’ve even pitched in myself with a build gallery with annotations.

So, this summer I intend on getting out and flying as much as I can, and competing as often as I can in regional contests. The Allegro-Lite will be along for the tow as well!

This past weekend, I joined a couple other of my RC soaring friends from LASS, and headed down to Wilson, North Carolina for the 2004 East Coast HLG Festival. Recently I picked up well-used discus-launched glider from a club mate, and by gum I was going to compete this year! Below is a recounted of this weekend wherein I managed to win my first trophy for soaring, a third place in the “sportsman” class competition. Click on “read more” to see the full story…

note: Yeah, I know I didn’t take any photos. I managed to mess up and delete a bunch, but luckily Peter Jensen should be posting a big bunch very soon.

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David Gruneisen wrote:
> How did it go?

It went very well!

We stopped off in Raleigh on Friday to see Bruce’s buddy who has a 10,000 gallon saltwater aquarium in his house in the suburbs — AMAZING! He apparently had some calamity a couple months back involving his aquarium maintainer dumping a shitload of tap water into his tank while he was on vacation, so there was algae all over the place. Not that a layperson like I would really even notice such things, but it was clear he was professionally ashamed. His “pump room” was quite impressive. We later went to a local ale-house/sports bar thing for dinner. He spoke of dive trips to the Great Barrier Reef, Indonesia and the Phillipines.

We drove on down to Wilson, N.C. to the hotel, checked in and made some last-minute repairs.

Saturday morning we arrive bright and early at the field, which was bordered by a harvested cotton field on the left and rear, and soybeans on the right, with a treeline off in the distance if you stood facing forward. It was around 50 degrees, but the air was pretty still. I put my plane together to trim it out in this nice air, grab my frequency pin off the board, and after a couple of launches, I began getting radio interference! From about 10-15 feet she takes an inverted nose-dive into the ground. The boom has cracked near the fuselage! Oh no! I turn around to find that he who shot me down was none other than Phil Barnes — the maker of the wings that Bruce and I (and many others) fly on. Phil (as he would show later) is a terribly helpful guy, and immediately starts helping me repair with some carbon. Luckily, the cracks are just longitudinal cracks, and the repair goes smoothly.

The other competitors have begun to arrive for the 9AM pilots meeting, and shortly the contest gets underway. They make the announcement that they will be giving away 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places trophies for “sportsman” class entrants as well! Cool. There turned out to be 10 sportsman entrants, most of which hadn’t flown an HLG contest yet. There are 26 pilots, and there are going to be 12 rounds (8 Saturday, 4 on Sunday) with 3 heats of about 9 pilots a piece. Each round is a different “task”. The first round task was “Total time – 2 minute flights max”, and scoring is always how many seconds you were “in flight”. So there is a possible 600 points per round. However, with the 2 minute max flight time, a little time will be wasted in the transition from landing to re-launch (or “relight” as it is known). Bruce claims the the good people can do it in around 2 seconds, so optimally you could see something like 594 seconds being scored. Each heat is scored individually (called “man-on-man” style, so the person (or people) with the top score(s) in each heat get 1000 points, and everyone else is prorated from that score. This is helpful because the lift comes and goes quite often in a contest, so it wouldn’t be fair to the folks in later/earlier heats. So anyway, I managed to score 964 points out of 1000, meaning I did 96.4% as well as the top scorers in my heat.

The next round was 5 longest flights, 2 minutes max. You could launch as many times as you wanted, and the top 5 counted towards your total. You could fly OVER 2 minutes, but you’d only get 2 minutes worth of points. Towards the end of the round, with about 1:30 to go, and lift in the air, I managed to cartwheel my plane a little, and the boom re-broke in the same area we had fixed! Bummer!

Now it’s got a small radial crack in it, so I go and get MORE uni-directional carbon from Phil, re-wrap that area, apply it with thin CA and kicker to harden, then I put some .75oz fiberglass cloth on it and CA/kicker it, and then wrap that area with some kevlar fishing line, and more CA/kicker! By god, if it breaks now, it won’t be from lack of trying. Unfortunately, I had to stay out of round 3 (five 3-minute flights), and drew a zero for that round. Lunch was up next, and I finished up my repairs and had the tastiest of NC BBQ for lunch. I finished up lunch and tested out my repairs. I throw easy at first, and then as hard as I can. Looks GREAT! WTF! One of my wing servos has decided to start messing up! What the hell? Ah well, I had been flying my beater wing anyway. I had fixed up another wing (one of Bruce’s cast offs), and it had two good servos in it, thankfully. It was nice and clean (compared to the beater), and I was getting better hang times and launches out of it. The fourth round (Three 3-minute flights and 1 one-minute flight in any order) comes, and I roar out of the gate with 966.9 points! I was one of only 8 of the pilots to score above 900 in that round. Woo-hoo. I’m back, baby! The repair manages to stick together for the rest of the day, and I’m pretty happy.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Brian Kopke has been flying and timing along with me, and his Art Hobby Hyper DL is just getting punished! First he breaks the throwing peg out of the wing, which we quickly repaired with CA and carbon fiber, and then another break in the rudder, and another, etc, etc. He manages to patch it all back together, and flies in every round, battling through adversity! For a plane he had never flown before Saturday (his first soaring contest), he’s doing just fine, and really making the effort.

Oh, Phil later tells me that if send Denny (who assembles the XP4 DLGs, like I fly) my address, he’ll send me a new wing. Denny also tells me he has some leftover pods as well, so I’m going to end up with some loot out of the whole deal. My whole rig really isn’t worth a new wing anyway, so that goes to show you how supportive these guys are.

The first day comes to an end, some Negro Modelos are passed around, and some guys throw together their Pocket Combat Wings (http://www.edgerc.com/pcw.htm) and start trying to limbo under the tents near the pits, flying no more than six feet away from me as I sit in a camp chair. Many crashes ensue, with much hilarity. Then someone whips out a Pocket Combat wing with a CD-ROM motor on it. HOLY SHIT. Pure unlimited vertical performance on this little wing. It was INSANE. BAT-SHIT INSANE. The motor winding kit is something like $20 but he can crank out 38,000 RPMs and pulls 10 amps out of an 850mah LiPo 3-cell pack. It was CRANKING. The Pocket Combat Wings were no slouches either, but they certainly didn’t have the vertical performance of that wing w/ the CD-ROM motor. Later hilarity ensued as Phil Barnes lowered the tent they were flying under, causing the pilot to lose the plane into a large (50 ft) holly tree. Phil, again feeling bad (“I break it, I fix it!”) bounds up this holly tree and shakes the wing down. He might be a plane-wrecker, but he’s a generous and nice one at that :)

We ate at the most bizarre restaurant in which I have ever eaten that night. It’s called “Griff’s Steak Barn”. It doesn’t actually look like a barn, in fact I think it may have been a bank at some point. The waiters are all dressed in black and white, and they have a wood-paneled coat-check and little butter mints on the counter and a nice marble foyer, but the rest of the restaurant reminds me of that bizarre “Friendly’s” place that used to be in Oxmoor mall. It’s all sort of this wild steamboat sort of decoration, with a room that appears to have been a vault at some point. It feels very old, but with many, many coats of paint. We were filed past many, many rooms and put into one in the rear. There was an Ale8One sign above the door with their old slogan “It Glorifies!”. It was strange. The steak was shitty and undercooked for medium-rare. It was just strange.

Sunday came, and we headed back out to the field to complete the remaining four rounds. It was cool and VERY calm, and some guys are taking advantage of the time to trim their planes in the deadest of dead air. Phil Barnes gets 2 minutes 5 seconds in dead air, and his launches are SUPER high. Bruce trims his plane and gets a little over 2 minutes after about 4 flights with successively more and more up elevator. Me, I was only managing 1:10s or 1:20s or so. Trimming is done, and the pilot meeting is held, and then the rain comes! I’ve never flown in the rain before, but safe to say this foam wings with the porous kevlar skins start taking on some water here and there, and my balsa tail surfaces are probably getting a little heavy. The first round is a real meat-grinder. It’s a “ladder” task of 1:10, 1:20, 1:30, 1:40, 1:50, and 2:00 minute flights you HAVE to make at least the first flight to move onto the second. So, if you have a 1:05 flight, SORRY! You had to make at least 70 seconds to move onto the 80 second task. I managed to eek out a 1:10 and 1:20, by the 1:30 flight, I was just too heavy, and there was so little lift. This is truly were the launch-height comes in REAL handy.

I finished out the other three rounds with respectable sportsman-class scores of a 717, 700 and a 698 (I’m consistently mediocre!)

At lunch they had a raffle for a JR-6102 radio, a Taboo DLG kit, and an XP-4 DLG kit, along with some servos and a couple of Allegro carbon tailbooms from tailbooms.com. The radio actually goes to contest director Dick Proseus, and the two kits go to two others whom I don’t remember. Both Bruce and Brian get some tailbooms, and I get two worthless raffle tickets :)

Then the top six out of the whole bunch fly in 3 fly-off rounds. Phil Barnes is in first place leading Bruce in second by about 100 points. The contest director, Dick Proseus makes it into the finals, but shortly before the fly-offs, he and Phil Barnes have a mid-air 6 feet off the ground, which knocks Dick’s elevator clean off! He quickly runs back to get another plane, and returns shortly. I time for Bruce, and to tell you the truth, I was a bit nervous! I mean, I’ve got to act like the eyes in the back of the head of the Nat’l champ here, and make sure I don’t mess up the timing. All of the fly-off tasks were limited-throw tasks, like 5 longest flights, 2 minute max, max five throws. Phil and Bruce duked it out for top honors, neither giving an inch. Adam “Red” Weston (past-maker of the Red Herring, and who now makes the Maple Leaf Encore DLG), who flew in from Seattle makes a good charge from fourth place into third with some daring flying.

In the end, Bruce only managed to make up 6 points on Phil, who ended up winning the contest. Red Weston managed to take in 3rd place by winning two of the 3 fly-off rounds, Dick Proseus made 4 places, reformed sloper Spencer Lisenby came in 5th, and Shane Spikler ended up in 6th.

So, as far as the “sportsman” class goes, Adam Propst gets first with 9526 points, Charles Frey had 8709 points and I have 8137 points for third. If only I hadn’t dropped that third round!It was a pretty high-scoring round for all involved, I think the average was around 900 points. So maybe I would have at 9037 points, who knows! In any case, I’m crazy happy about attending the contest, and am looking forward to many more in my future. I got a nice big glass mug etched with the LSF logo, and “DESS HLG 2004″ on it and a 3rd place ribbon.

We made a hasty retreat after the contest ended (about 3:30), and it took us about 9 1/2 hours to get back home. Whew. Lots of fun, lots of great people, and a big learning experience. Yee-haw!

So I enjoy flying radio-controlled model gliders (with our local club), and I also subscribe to a mailing-list for like minded individuals called the Radio-Controlled Soaring Exchange (RCSE). For a while now there have been reports of people crashing their planes due to radio interference whenever the President of the United States was within 50 miles of a flying field. This had happened quite a few times in Ohio, with one incident involving a fly-over of an AWACS surveillance plane over a soaring contest which resulted in the crashing of a model sailplane. There has been a lot of speculation as to the true cause of these radio interruptions, but today I saw a message that would seem to corroborate the suspicions of governmental security:

Hi all,
If you will remember last week I sent out a notice about flying here in the valley, well today an incident happened, Randy’s friend Bruce was ask[ed] very nicely to stop flying his electric powered wing type glider, by none other the US Secret Service. So they do have the ability to seek us out. Must have been by GPS.
President Bush spoke here in Medford/Central Point, OR tonight, landed about 3:25 PM this afternoon. I’m no sure what time Bruce was flying, but he was ask to land and not fly the rest of the day. At least he was not shot down [this is a term for crashing due to radio interference -ed.] by the unknown.

Jerry Miller, SOSS

Anyone involved with a hobby knows that there are some involved that can get pretty bent out of shape when protecting their interests, but so far the reaction has been pretty tame to all of this speculation. Personally, I find it all very intriguing. Makes me wonder how deep security planning goes. Are they watching messageboards and mailing-lists of RC aviators? I’d probably think they would be, just to be safe.

Reading an article today on the Ansari X Prize today, I noticed that SpaceShipOne was sponsored by Virgin — the megagroup that includes wireless phones and record labels. Upon further reading, I found that the new name for their space-ventures is Virgin Galactic. That is awesome. Word on the street that the first CEO will be Galacticus, Eater of Worlds. VP is of course, Silver Surfer.

This weekend, I competed in my first-ever sailplane competition. The competition was held in Lexington, Kentucky by the Bluegrass Soaring Society. The 2004 Mid-American Soaring Championships was held for the 28th year, this year at beautiful Jacobson Park on the east-side of Lexington.

I’m currently working towards my League of Silent Flight Level II certification, and I need 6 contests to complete that level. The contest spanned both Saturday and Sunday, and I had a plane that could compete in two different levels — both “Unlimited Sportsman” and “RES” (Rudder/Elevator/Spoiler). My first day, Saturday went pretty well for my first contest. I ended up 5th out of 9 in Unlimited Sportsman and 9th out of 16 in RES. Sunday, however, was a different story all together. I was again competing in two classes, and while the clouds were very low early in the morning (around 600 feet), I took my chances and went up for my first RES flight. The flight went pretty well, and I got 6:49 out of 8 minutes for the flight and an 84 out of 100 for my landing points. Then I said “Hey! Let’s shoot for one of my Sportsman class flights!” Feeling all heady with my earlier flight, I brought it back to the line. I plugged the battery in, switched on my transmitter, and with fellow LASS-mate Gordy ready to time me, I sent it up the winch. Pretty good! A little too left, okay now it’s way left, push it back right, okay good! Left again? What the hell? No response! NOOOOOO! It nosed in about 50 yards from the winch, so hard that the nose was in about 6 inches, and the very sturdy fuselage and tail were shattered. One wing was completely snapped in half, and the other sustained minor damage.
I hauled it back to the pits, and after investigating a possible radio-frequency conflict, I figured out the issue was actually with a battery cable. It would seem that a lot of jostling and pulling in and out of this cable caused a weak connection in the wire, as it would cut power at the slightest touch.

But not to fear — I came back with my 2-meter Spirit and finished out the rest of the day (4 flights), managing to get 9:58 out of 10 minutes on both flights and 91 out of 100 on two flights, with the other two being rather unimpressive. Overall, I think I finished DFL in the Sportsman class, but considering I killed one of my planes and got a zero in the first round, not so bad.

So aside from the calamity, I had a blast! Lots of fun. You can see photos of the contest here: 2004 Mid-American Championship gallery at LouisvilleSoaring.org

class="External">Time.com has a neat little photo-gallery of early photos of John Kerry taken by “Pumping Iron” director George Butler. My favorite?
Kerry built model planes after his failed bid in ’72. Obviously.

Bush fans may want to purchase a replica of the Bush/Cheney 2000 Campaign plane. A mere $35.

Normally, I don’t post stuff about my model sailplane hobby, but I thought that this neat idea was worth it. One of the ingenius guys at the Charles River RC club had the neat idea to fix a GPS to his plane and then take the information it gave him and plot it in 3-D space. The result was this image. He then later mixed that in with some satellite photography and came up with this image. Pretty neat! You’ll be able to read about it next month in an article he is preparing here next month.

update: for those interested, the original thread I found this on is here on LiftZone‘s forums: Show Me Your Launches!

Aw man, a whole MONTH and nothing new. Damn. Well, I can tell you I’ve been busy. I can tell you that, but it’s really a lie. I just haven’t had much to report on lately. Spring’s thaw is almost here, which is good, because I was feeling the chill of winter a little too closely. I can’t wait to get out and play some soccer and do a little r/c soaring.

In other news, I do have an impending site update “in-the-works”, I am also getting close to finishing up a freelancing side-project (tho’ I’ve been approached for a couple others, too), and work is going well. I’ve been a semi-productive little monkey lately. It feels good.

I haven’t posted in terribly too long, but it’s been the holiday season, and I’ve been busy with family and work and some freelance stuff, and of course flying RC sailplanes! I just recented discovered slope soaring, and have had a blast the last two weekends down at the Frankfort slope.

I’m going to get a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 40 gig MP3 player for Christmas, and I’m psyched! My nearly 4 year obsession with portable jukeboxery come to fruition!

Things coming up include my and Kelly’s Christmas Day Oasis at our house, and Gary returns from Japan for a short while, and I think I’ll HOPEFULLY be launching the newly redesigned thelocust.org soon. Don’t hold your breath, please.

The Helios solar-powered aircraft from NASA’s Dryden Research Center has crashed into the Pacific! It was a one-of-a-kind craft, and truly amazing! Uber-lightweight, and capable of staying aloft for a long, long time…. NASA does intend on building another, saying “the technology is worth pursuing”.

Wanna see some movies?