[AlaskaRC] Further flying factoids

Dirk & Alison atdg588 at acsalaska.net
Sun Dec 20 16:31:24 AKST 2015


Further flying factoids gleaned from Do You Speak Model Airplane, the Story
of Aeromodeling in America by Dave Thornburg:

The heyday for model airplane building, flying and participation started in
1927 with Lindberg's flight and ended in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik.
The 1930s saw the highest participation rates and the 1950s saw a boom in
the numbers of kits, engines and hobby stores.  There was not much going on
during the war years, in fact there was no more balsa in the later part of
the war.  

Radio controlled flying was not allowed during the war years due to a ban on
private citizen broadcasting stations.  Some in the government wanted to ban
model flying entirely but were finally convinced that was not necessary.  

The military found that model builders were easier to train for air and
ground crew and ninety-eight percent of WWII navy pilots built models before
the war.  Which is one reason why the NAVY sponsored the AMA NATs for 25
years, using it as a recruiting tool.  The NAVY also asked the modelers to
help carve out thousands of solid wooden recognition models.

Balsa wood was first used in this country as a packing cushion for shipping
heavy items.  It was not really used for model aircraft until after
Lindberg.  The time 1907 to 1927 has been referred to as the pre-balsa era.
And of course the use of balsa was criticized by the folks that were using
spruce and pine for building model airplanes.  It takes more skill to make
joints and splices using spruce and pine than it does balsa, though models
made of the harder woods lasted longer.

In the 1930s there many national model clubs, and hundreds of local clubs
for a modeler to join and in almost every case these clubs were sponsored by
commercial interests as a means of advertising.  The commercial interests
included newspapers, department stores, local hardware stores and gasoline
companies like Texaco.  The Junior Birdman club (Hearst newspapers) had at
least 660,000 members in 1937 and the Junior Aviator Club had about 300,000.
The estimate was that there were some two million model airplane builders
just before the war.  Contrast these numbers with the 175,000 members of the
AMA today.  Though there are folks who build and fly while not being a
member of AMA.

In 1937, one kit manufacturer had 600 employees and were knocking out 46,000
kits a day at peak times ( I find this number astonishing but it is the
number in the book).  At the time the model magazines tended to have 1 part
fictional aviation stories, 1 part full scale news and 1 part model news
with construction articles.  One magazine, Air Battles, sent out 1,750,000
copies per month.  

The first model airplanes were free flight gliders and rubber powered
models, the next oldest type of model control is R/C and the newest type of
model aircraft control is U-Control.  

Radio control was born in the mid-1930s and was flown in the 1937 nationals
five or six years before U-Control. 

While gas powered model planes have been flying in circles on a tether in
the 1930s, it wasn't until US Patent #2292416, Controlled Captive-Type Toy
Airplane, in 1942, that U-Control using 2 wires and a bellcrank finally
became popular, though the U/C boom did not really start until after WWII.
L.M. Cox of Cox Aircraft finally broke the patent in 1955.  There were plans
for a model using 4 control wires advertised in 1937 in Model Aircraft News
that the Judge felt showed prior knowledge.  Until then you either bought
U-Control models from A-J Aircraft out of Oregon or from kit makers that had
a license agreement from A-J Aircraft.  

The Almost Ready to Fly (ARF) question was being discussed in the late
1930s, and again in the 1950s, that is, whether ARF kits were destroying our
sacred hobby or not.  

In 1964 there were discussions about where all the young modelers had gone
and what to do about encouraging them back into the hobby.  Television was
identified as a main competitor for time to spend on hobbies.   But then
there is this quote: "If we do not want our hobby to be considered childish,
then it simply cannot be centered on the child."

Back in the 1970s when I was messing with engines I knew to use glow fuel or
hot fuel and to use hot fuel proof finishes on the model.  But I never
really knew what hot fuel was or why it was called that.  In the late 1930s
there was a quest for better fuels to run in the speed contests and this led
to the use of alcohol.  Alcohol based fuel was referred to as hot fuel; hot
fuel meant alcohol based not gasoline based fuel.

In the spring of 1947 it was discovered that a fuel mixture of 35% white
gas, 25% castor oil, 20% nitro-ethane, 10% ether and 10% turpentine would
burn hot enough that an ignition engine would run after removing the plug
wire.  This stared a fad to file down the sparkplug electrode to allow it to
glow better.  At the 1947 NATS the first glow plugs were handed out for beta
testing.  At the time the commercial fuels were using up to 37.5% of
nitro-ethane.    

In the 1930s and 1940s you had to have a ham radio license in order to fly
R/C.  The ham license required taking a test on radio theory and being able
to send and receive Morse code.  Since it took a lot of knowledge and skill
to build a flying model and a lot of knowledge and skill to design a radio
transmitter and receiver it usually took two people in collaboration to fly
R/C.  One person designed and built the airplane and the other designed and
built the radio.  There were circuit designs and construction articles for
transmitters and receivers in the modeling magazines.  

After the war the AMA asked the FCC to provide an exam-free radio band for
R/C flying but they said no.  After the FCC learned that folks were using
the radio bands to fly model airplanes they hit the 47, 48 and 51 NATs to
threaten and harass folks for using radios without licenses.  It was 1952
when an exam-free radio band was assigned for R/C use, 27.255 megacycle.

It was not until 1955 when you could order a transmitter and receiver
readymade via mail order and this was for rudder only.

Remember the covers of RCM?  The photographer for those covers understood
the simple but profound secret of model airplane photography, a beautiful
female makes any airplane interesting. 

Phil Kraft's Ugly Stick came out in 1964  "Nobody ever went broke
underestimating the taste of the American public." 

It seems like every time something new comes in the hobby there becomes a
division between the supporters and the detractors, we've seen this schism
when balsa replaced spruce, when gas motors replaced rubber bands, when R/C
started challenging free flight, when R/C went from rudder-only to
multi-channel, when ARFs appeared to replace build-your-own, when monokote
looked to replace silk and tissue and now we are seeing it with electric
motors and lipos and multirotor aircraft.  

The book was published in 1992 and only about 2,000 copies were printed.
There is a whole lot more detail in the book, I just summarized some points
I found interesting.   

Dirk



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