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- Tell
us all about your model flying club and report on your activities. E-mail me with some idea of
the sort of facilities you have, size of membership, types of model flown,
social activities, reports of special events, site availability, guest
arrangements, frequency of meetings, location, or anything else you
can think to mention. Pictures will also be most welcome, and if you
want to send me pictures by conventional post, my address now
appears on the home
page. If your club has a website, let me know the address and I
will pay you a virtual visit!
|
 Meet
the 495th R/C Squadron
The 495th R/C Squadron is a model flying club located
in Tewkesbury, Boston, Massachusetts, and has been a chartered club of
the AMA since 1970. Our interest in the 495th is because it is the home
club of EDWIN SILVA, who introduced himself to us on the last post box
page. The club is named after Route 495 which
encircles the outskirts of Boston. During the construction of this
highway, the club originators used the road after the workers had left
for the day! Membership in recent years has ranged from between 90 and
140 men, women and youngsters with a fairly high proportion of beginners
at any one time. The Club holds monthly meetings in a local church hall
and runs several contests during the year as well as enjoying the
occasional social occasion, including trips to other major model flying
events.  495th
members enjoy the benefit of two well-maintained flying sites in the
locality, one of which is pictured here in a fine aerial shot taken from
JOHN MANDEL'S model-mounted camera. Click this thumbnail for an enlarged
view - the detail on the ground is quite remarkable.
 The
Club has an attractive website with a good selection of pages
covering a variety of topics as you see from this reproduction
of the main navigation menu that appears on the home page. The
Member Pages have an interesting variety of items on them such
as Tips and Tricks, Items for Sale and Chuck's Helicopter Page.
Also linked to this page is an account of the conception, design
and construction of a unique plane - Rupert Kosmala's HA-1 -
which is pictured on our photo gallery
page, along with a few other pictures taken during a Saturday
morning session at one of the club fields.
The
Membership page is worth a visit by beginners in the hobby. The
Questions and Answers section is aimed at those thinking of joining the
club, and the 495th's structured training program is also set out, but
both items carry general information that is well-worth reading whether
or not membership of the 495th is an option. All-in-all,
it's a good website, although I did suffer a few frustrations with some
of the navigation buttons sometimes blanking out for some reason unknown
to me, but the nice background music that accompanies the site helped
keep me calm!
http://www.495thsquadron.org/
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KINGSLEY NEUMANN, Secretary
of HOLDFAST MODEL AERO CLUB which was featured on ModelFlight
#26 has
kindly sent some more information and news on the club. |
| The Holdfast Club (funny name
relates to the bay nearby which was named in admiralty charts as
a good anchorage back in the early days - 1800s?) is a very good
Club. There are about 800 registered modellers in South
Australia, belonging to 25 Clubs. We are the largest at 131,
mainly because we are close to the city of Adelaide. The only
threat we have is from communication towers which are popping up
all over the place. We already have two near our boundary, but
we can avoid them fairly easy. Unfortunately models occasionally
collide with them, damaging the elements of the antennae. This
has cost us money in the past. We decided to stand the cost
ourselves rather than make an insurance claim.
The Club is quite well off with assets of over
$70,000. The main asset is our new Club Room which is a vast
improvement over the old garage. We have air-conditioning,
telephone, kitchen, toilets and disabled facilities. With the
weather being very hot here just recently the air conditioner
comes in very handy. It has been over 35C every day for about
two weeks, but a cool change is wafting through the city as I
write.
We have fairly large number of learners and
low experience flyers. There is of course an equally large
number of experienced flyers and people who have been in the
hobby for thirty or forty years. Safety is a big issue. We
are bounded by two busy roads and we get a lot of members of the
public dropping in to watch. We have just installed a safety
barrier for the pilots on the flight line. It consists of twenty
large plastic devices which can be filled with water and used
near road works. We picked them up cheap and do not fill them
with water so we can move them around for the mower. It gives
you a feeling of security flying from behind the barrier. We
have had a number of incidents where persons flying their models
have been hit in the legs by a wayward takeoff or landing!
The flavour of the month is helicopters. We
have about fourteen in the Club now and only one heli
instructor. We generally fly on mode 1, although some people
have learned overseas on mode 2 and stuck with it.
I am trying to get more photos on the web page, having just
bought a scanner. The web page is very important. Everybody
expects to see one don't they?
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| Thanks for that,
Kingsley, and also for your kind comments on the earlier feature
on your club. Let me know when you've got some pictures up and I
will pop one or two on the Modelflight photo gallery. |
|
| Our good friend Tore Loodin and
his pals have had another good evening's indoor flying - well, his pals
did!
Dear Reg,
Here comes a short report from our
second indoor site, the gymnastics hall at fhe Tallbacka school. Much
the same enthusiasts as in Stava were there. The most remarkable person
was Birgit Törnkvist, who in October won the open class in the "Flugan"
(Flee) Cup in Dalecarliar in October last year. She flew several minutes
with her prize-winning model. Unfortunately I've got no picture of her
or name of the model. But I have a picture of husband Georg
Törnqvist's wonderful scale model of "Demoiselle", the
original of which stands at the air museum at Paris.
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The blue painted struts on the model
are -I'm not joking- made from grass! Georg picks the grass in
the summer and dries it over the winter. Then he polishes it with fine
sandpaper to get rid of the fatty surface and uses it in application as
shown. Georg says that the grass is very strong for its weight and ideal
for minimodels. Georg is nearly as good as Birgit as a competing
freeflighter and a well-known specialist in his branch. |
| Then there is a "lens bug"
like me showing off the Mini Scorpion. Even if it didn't fly due to too
few nicad cells, it looked as if it should be airborne if properly
propelled. Instead I had to do engine noises with my lips to make
everyone believe that it actually flew! Now I have soldered another cell
to the battery pack, so next time it will take to the air. |
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Ceasar, who sits at my side, says
"miuu"!
Bye-bye for now.
One of these days we will see one of Tore's models actually
flying! Tore's cat, Ceasar, is our 'cat's corner' mascot!
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E-mail
me now with news of your club or send me the website URL and let's visit
your club on ModelFlight. |
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