Christchurch and District Model Flying Club
 

editorial

Two things on my mind this time - the first is:

Field Discipline

Originally I was a solo flier, happy in Farnham Park or the cliffs of Cornwall, with no idea at all of how to fly at a Club field. I’d wander around, tranny in hand, keeping gliders in the air, flying my first power models round me like a control-liner, happy as a pig in ...clover. My first inkling that there was another way of doing things came at Rheindahlen MFC, where all the pilots stood in a line to fly up and down the strip. This was new! and I didn’t really enjoy it very much. I preferred to hike out on my own and carry on as before.

Joining CDMFC was something of a shock - here was a Club with a structure and rules. We flew on public land, where any dog walker, lollygagger or poodlefaker* could come along and look over your shoulder or even stand in the way. It was soon obvious that we had to stick together for our own benefit. I also flew occasionally at Howard’s Field near Ringwood. This was a completely different set-up; very disciplined, almost all the fliers very conscious that the slightest infringement could bring about the loss of the field. It was a slightly intimidating place to fly, but not because of the people, who were very friendly and supportive, but because of the grass runways, which were far too narrow and short for my skill level.

When Trevor and I flew at Chilliwack when there were often four or five models in the air at once, we saw the same disciplined approach, but with a lot more communication than is usual here. Most fliers told the flight line what they planned to do, like “low pass left to right”, “landing next circuit”, touch and go” as well as the usual courtesies such as “on the field!”.

Even at the Hurn site, where it’s not even a Club and there are no written flying rules, there is always a traffic cone out on the field. This is where you stand to fly. And it works, even on crowded Sundays.

Then a couple of years ago we got a gift from the Gods in the shape of Strawberry Field, and very shortly afterwards, permission to fly at Longham Reservoir. For the first time since 1966 we had our own, private, very good, flying sites. And now each site has its own rules, and I think that we should all do our best to conform to them. If you fly at Longham it’s simple enough; you can only stand and fly from one of the platforms provided by Sembcorp, and you can only fly over the reservoir. At Strawberry Field things are made more complicated by the size and shape of the site, but it’s still pretty simple: you park by the barn, sign in and pay, put your planes in the pits area by the white-painted posts and fly on and off the mown strip, keeping away from the no-fly zones.

And yet...

Just the other day we had:

A pilot walking out to retrieve a model on the far side of the field, but giving no warning at all. Other fliers don’t have the spare eyes to look around all the time just in case someone has gone for a stroll.

Another pilot stood well away from the others at the flight line and shouted “taking off” and immediately opened the throttle, completely unaware, because he was away from the group, that someone else was landing. It is plain politeness as well as very good basic safety practice to ask the other fliers if it’s OK to take off, land, walk onto the field etc.

It’s true that novices under instruction need a quiet environment to get the best from their lesson. Their brains are processing a lot of unfamiliar information, they have an instructor in one ear and their model in the other. They really don’t need what passes for witty banter to put them off. In these cases, the flight line should respect their need to concentrate - and in my experience they invariably do.

I don’t know what it is about Strawberry Field that brings out the worst in Club fliers...but it does!

(1) I speak only of flat field flying. I’m not a sloper...yet.

* Poodlefaker - I came across this lovely word in the Journal of the Life Guards C1970 in an article about skiing. It means a ladies man.

Secondly, there’s the Construction and Finish Competition

IMHO (as they say on RC Groups) this competition needs a good shake-up to allow fair judging. The light in our Club room simply isn’t good enough to see the models in sufficient detail to pass any sort of judgement. The voting system is hopeless: some people voted for four models, some for all of them, and although this didn’t affect the overall result, models with very few votes inevitably did worse than those with lots of votes, because the total scores were not divided by the number of votes to give a mean score. (I’ve done this, so the scores and places below represent what the models average/mean score was and this has changed the results “down the field”) And why were model builders denied a vote? We obviously would not vote for our own planes, but surely we are allowed to score others?

It was very gratifying to see so many models presented for judging, after the very lean years we have had recently, but to be honest, it was impossible to compare (for example) Martin Pressnell’s free flight rubber powered masterpiece with Trevor’s Aquabird or Clive’s Albatros.

And it must have taken quite a bit of courage for the novice builders to bring along their creations, knowing all too well that they would be marked on the same basis as those of us who have built perhaps 20 or 30 models.

I don’t think a return to the old system where models had to be brought to a Club night “undressed” to be judged on construction by a small committee of two members, then brought to the final night after being finished and flown is possible - the room just does not lend itself to any sort of close inspection and the time constraints are just too prescriptive. But nor do I think that the current system works either.

As a minimum, I think we should have different categories - Novice and Expert perhaps, or at least a First Build category separate from the rest.

Please let me know what you think - someone in the Club must have the answer!

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