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There are always plans and expectations when you go to a large and important contest like the 2024 FAC Nats.  I think everyone has dreams of how it will turn out.  Mine were big plans; I intended to defend my 2022 Non-Scale Championship.  This is not particularly easy as you must place significantly high in most, if not all of the non-scale events.  This year, that included: Old Time Stick, Jimmie Allen, Old Time Fuselage, 2-Bit, Half-Wakefield, and Embryo.  I was also defending NoCal Champ and had several Scale events that I intended to fly.  All-in-all, I registered for 27 events to be flown over the three days of official flying.  That’s a lot of flying and it is known (to me, at least) that I would never get all of them flown, but you have to have big plans to make big things happen.

As I posted earlier, I worked hard between the mid-June contest in Muncie and the mid-July contest in Geneseo to fix and build planes.  I built three new planes (Miss Production for OT Stick, KK Gipsy for ½ Wake, and Folkerts SK-2 for NoCal) and repaired 10 planes.  Some of this worked and some of it was for naught, but all of it had to be done.

Sometimes Hung smiles on you and sometimes Hung toys with you.  He was toying with me all week.  Invariably, I would put up a test flight and it would be well over a max and I would go to official flights and struggle to get even one of the three official flights to exceed two minutes.  This is so frustrating when a) you know the planes are good for it and b) you know you will likely need three maxes to even compete for the top spot in many events.  But half of success is just showing up, so I kept plugging away.

I won’t bore you with too many details, but I had some spectacular flights and almost all of them were not officials.  One was a test flight on my Miss Production:  the DT went off dutifully at 2:05 and the plane landed at 3:06 – deep in the 9-foot-tall corn.  Thanks to Tom Hallman, Pat Murray, and Winn Moore it was found and I could continue – no, START – flying Old Time Stick.

Another “thanks” needs to go out to Vance Gilbert.  On Wednesday evening, he stopped by when I was flying my Jumbo Focke-Wulf FW-189.  I’ve had it for a couple years now, but can only really fly it at large contests.  He helped me with the final trimming and it started climbing out and flying right.  His recommendations?  “That thing is ready, stop messing around and put some turns in those motors.”  He was right.  More Power and it climbed to altitude and got some decent times.  I flew it in WWII-Combat (a mass Launch event).  There were 31 pilots and the first round took out 11 – but not me!  I made it to the second round (where they took out 10) and made a respectable middle-of-the-pack 14^th place showing.  I was satisfied.  Few people fly models that large in WWII and virtually no one is crazy/stupid enough to fly a large TWIN-engined model.  So, being crazy/stupid, I did and I was happy with the results.  I know some people took videos of the rounds, I’ like to see my plane in action.

I later flew it for times in Jumbo Scale.  At the FAC Nats, Jumbo requires an Average of three flights to compute your overall flight score.  One single flight isn’t good enough; you need three flights.  So I had a decent first flight (roughly 55-seconds) – the photo here is where it landed.  And then I did a second flight after adding a touch of nose weight to help the pitchy glide.  The video shows that entire flight – Including the reason why I didn’t get to make a third flight.  Regardless, I took 5^th in Jumbo (awards are to five places at the FAC Nats) – again, I was pleased with the performance.  Watch the video – the ending may surprise you.

As for the non-Scale events, I flew every one, but only maxed-out in OT Stick. I had started with my trusty Holy Ike.  I had a max test flight followed by a too-short first official – 10 seconds under 120.  So I set that aside and got out my back-up – the brand-new Miss Production.  Eventually, I got three maxes.  The CD had decided that tie-breakers (if there were ties) were to be decided by an unlimited fourth flight.  I waited until after 4pm and put up a 2.5 minute flight – the shortest flight I had made with the Miss Production all day!  Because of that short unlimited flight, I placed second in OT stick.

I kept going in the non-Scale events, but my performances were not very notable.  Well, I was fifth in OT Fuselage and did manage to win Half-Wakefield – with a brand-new half-size Keil Kraft Gipsy.  In fact, my “showing up” in all the events was enough for me to place second behind Tom Hallman for Non-Scale Champion.  That’s pretty good, I guess.

Two more notes:

Firstly, a report on my three new builds done in the 3+weeks immediately before Geneseo:  the Miss Production triple-maxed and placed second in OT Stick, the Gipsy placed first in Half-Wake and my trimmed-trimmed-on-the-field-and-adjusted-during-official-flights NoCal Folkerts Sk-2 placed second in NoCal, behind Scott Richelen flying an F-4 Phantom with a single flight over 6 minutes long.  So it was a good thing I actually built those models as they were my best performing ones!

Lastly, a surprise for me at the Awards ceremony.  My Jumbo Focke-Wulf FW-189 won the “Earl van Gorder Memorial Award – World War Two Best of Show”.  This is a perpetual FAC Trophy awarded at the FAC-Nats only and the model is selected by anonymous judges based on appearance (and possibly impressiveness?), not performance.  It is an honor to have my model selected.  This is also sentimental to me for another reason:  Earl van Gorder wrote a column in the Flying Models magazine “Flying Things for Fledglings”.  Not only did I read that article, but I sent several plans to him when I was starting out in this whole plans business.  He was kind enough to comment on every one in his article and that helped me sell them for like $5 each.  That was way back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (check those old issues!)  Who knew where all that would lead?

My final Awards Ceremony tally:

1^st – Half-Wake – Keil Kraft Gipsy
2^nd – OT Stick – Miss Production
2^nd – NoCal – Folkerts SK-2
3^rd – National Air Races – Comper Swift
4^th – Modern Civilian – Bede BD-4 (Peanut)
5^th – OT Fuselage – HepCat
5^th – Jumbo Scale – Focke-Wulf FW-189