[AlaskaRC] Further flying factoids

Sun Dec 20 17:21:42 AKST 2015

Thanks for this Dirk. I think one take away from the history of modeling is
that everyone who comes to enjoy this hobby should be welcomed. The fun of
flight can be easily marred by quick judgements and separations between us
and them. Safety concerns are real with anything new and not yet
understood, gassers, fpv, or whatever come next. Us, newbies, need guidance
and assistance for you more experienced guys, both to be safe and have fun.
As few, who start with excitement and leave with their model in a bag, come
back.

Derrick
On Dec 20, 2015 4:30 PM, "Dirk & Alison via AlaskaRC" <
alaskarc at lists.alaskarc.org> wrote:

> 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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