Christchurch and District Model Flying Club
 

The Blizzard

By Brian Wiseman

Some time ago I bought a Blizzard. You will have seen the adverts in pretty well every magazine there is. They must have spent a great deal of money on advertising, I wonder what their break even point of sales were. I know many were sold, but I have never seen so much advertising for one plane. It is made of Foam but a special foam which is really compressed Polystyrene.

Anyway I succumbed to the adverts and bought one. Putting it together was difficult. The fuselage is in two halves with not much room inside. The tail is a V and the one servo goes in at the rear. The wire has to pass down inside the solid fuselage: there is a groove but not much of a one. I cleverly cut the end off a Servo lead, the cuts not opposite each other so the joins are at least an inch apart. Before sticking the two side together I had to fix the Receiver under the wing which I do not want to take off again. Then it was all stuck together for better or for worse.

You can see from the photo that the wing is a bit odd. Very narrow and thin. When I see Airliners trying to get airborne near Heathrow I am amazed at the small wing compared to first world war fighters whose wing to fuselage ratio was much larger. The Blizzard is like one of these Airliner only more so.

How does it fly? Well to start with I fly at Beaulieu, and I do not have the new 2.4 gHz radio system. I mention this because with 37 mHz radio systems at some points over the ground we get glitches. Sometimes bad enough to bring a plane down and always enough to raise your heartbeat. I am told that the modern 2.4 eliminates these glitches.

When you buy the planes you can have either the glider or what I call the hot motor. I had the hot motor and it sure can go fast. I cannot measure the speed but on full throttle back wind and a bit downhill I must get up to nearly 100 mph.. I do not do that often, because when I fly planes to their maximum speed bits falloff them. Bearing in mind the shape of the wing you have to go pretty quick to keep it up. It is possible to fly it slowly but you have to concentrate or it will go into a spiral dive and you cannot get it out. It has happened to me when I was landing it and did the last turn too slow and it slid down the wing. It was low and slow so there was not much damage. Now I keep it going at a good lick and it flies well. It is a bit of a handful mainly because of the speed and you do need a lot of sky. I still get a few glitches but if they happen at speed it keeps it up.

I now with my customary modesty claim a world record. I was flying the Blizzard at Beaulieu on a calm clear day and the Moon was over the end of the runway. I was looping the moon, which I thought was rather clever I then turned towards the moon and the plane disappeared for a few seconds. The only explanation I can offer was that it flew around the back of the Moon. My friend Ian Hammond was with me but he said he was not looking at the time. So I have no witnesses. As it happened A man came up and asked me to fly up near the moon again because he wanted to get a photo (This is actually true) he promised to send me a copy but I guess both the Moon and the Plane were too far away for his Camera. So I have no evidence for this record. I could send in a photo of the moon on its own but if the plane was behind it no one would know anyway.

As Shakespeare said, some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have

greatness thrust upon them. Some like me never seem to get anywhere, and when I

do make a record I cannot prove it.

Brian Wiseman

(To soften the blow to Brian’s esteem, here is one I took earlier: a model Chipmunk looping the moon at the Bimbo weekend earlier this year—Ed)

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