Santa Phantom

Dave W supplied this recent pic of Kermit and his perfect Christmas version of the Phantom Flash. It's the closest the club gets to "festive".

Apart from being a great flyer, it has many scale features, including rudolph's red nose and fourteen point antlers. Whether or not it meets Flying Aces stringent rules for non-military experimental aircraft remains to be seen.

Kermit! Tell us more about it.

Tom W

Gale Wagner's Amazing Flying School Bus

Gale builds big. He pleases himself when it comes to design, and he claims (as many times as you'll care to listen,) that he "doesn't know what he's doing."

For someone who doesn't know what he's doing, Gale sure gets great flights. And when you see his giant creations pulled skywards by a huge silver prop spinning slowly with the power of a few strands of rubber you'd be amazed too.

Actually, the braided motor is pretty big. It looks like a mooring rope for the QE2. It's a good thing Gale is proficient with the welding torch, because if his stooge came free of mother earth when reaching 500 winds, the model and steel stooge would be projected directly towards the winder at the speed of sound. And you thought playing with paper airplanes was sissy?

Gale is planning something much bigger for 2008.

FACT:

The late, great Walt Mooney (1926-1990) once took a design from a 3-view, to drawing up plans, through construction, covering and trimming, to a flyable scale model in an astonishing 14 hours!

Crunched

I just wanted to remember how good this model looked the day before I crunched it.

It suffered from a fatal flaw - it could only fly fast, but when it did, it became uncontrollable. (This short sentence has three its in it!)

After just a couple of brief forays at Lakeville, the foam cannons jammed during a low strafing run, and the pilot had no alternative but to ram a rock solid enemy clod the size of a rugby ball.

Later, out of the sight of my sensitive friends, I put the Spitfire Mark 24 out of its misery.

TWW