ARIZONA MODEL PILOTS SOCIETY started out as an empoyee club and had its very beginning when ten employees of the Arizona Public Service Deer Valley Facility got together on September 11, 1980, for an organization meeting to see how they might go about forming a club, to be sponsored by their employer. This is the club to which Steve 'Wulfman' Curry belongs and of whom you will find more on site seeing and personal profiles. Bill Goren, the club's first Secretary, came up with the name for the club, whilst Curt Thomas became Vice-President and was given responsibility for finding a flying site for the club. After some initial set-backs and frustrations, Curt found some useable State land which they cleared, graded, covered with decomposed granite, watered and rolled. Soon after starting to use the site, though, major drawbacks with its location made it clear that it was not ideally situated, so they continued to look for a better site. It was then that Adobe Dam Recreation Area came into the thinking and Curt set about looking for any unclaimed useable space in this 2,400-acre site that the club might be able to acquire. Curt found a small strip that he thought could be suitable, and then the real fight began! It was certainly not easy - there were many objections and difficulties to be overcome. To give themselves something more of a voice, the help of the Central Arizona Model Advisory Council was sought. This was clearly a very wise move, and at one stage CAMAC even enlisted the help of Senator Barry Goldwater to help overcome objections raised by the Army Corps of Engineers who had control of the area, and who felt that a model airport did not fit their concept for the park - his intervention worked and this particular problem disappeared! Eventually, in June 1983 and after overcoming many more obstacles along the way, the club received a temporary special use permit. By then, they had decided to open their membership to non-employees of APS. Word went out about the new club, a meeting was held at the site and forty-three people signed up and paid their dues of $25.00. AMPS had started!
With a membership in the region of 170 and no longer sponsored by APS at the club's request, AMPS is now into its second ten-year special use permit which superseded their temporary permit in 1985. Let's hope they succeed in securing their facility when that permit runs out in 2005.
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Sunday morning fly-in at Tibble Sports Centre Tore Loodin and the boys succeeded in hiring the sports centre in Tibble, a suburb of Stockholm, for a couple of hours one Sunday morning recently for an indoor fly-in. Catch some of the action and look at some of the models in this slightly edited version of Tore's report. Click all the pics for an enlarged view. |
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About 40 models of all kinds were mustered - mostly r/c assisted - and there was an audience of over 60 people. The flying was intensive - perhaps just a bit too much so for some of the exquisite free-flying models that were there. These were flown by very skilful modellers, such as "Maestro" Lilienberg with his Laird Solution (1) - you can gauge the size of the model from the fore-finger seen behind the cockpit, "Professor" Thornquist with a Spitfire and Sven Pontan with some very, very slow indoor duration models with transparent covering. The four-engine transport plane (2 and 3) is a look-a-like Hercules built by Olle Sköld, a bold teenager. The material is Depron, a plastic foam for insulation use. The only snag was the lack of passengers! The picture shows Eyvind Nyberg as he syncs the four engines. Tore himself made some flights with his KP01 engined free-flight Cub (4). a take-off from the floor resulted in a wing-tip-trailing circle at 10 cm of height! The other hand-launch resulted in the model diving to the floor, shedding the wing and an applauded speedway race round and round on the floor for several minutes! As those who have read Tore's reports before, his models DO like to be floor-bound! A spectacular crash occurred between Johan Bjurling's mini-helicopter Hornet and Sven Pontan's little transparent slow-flyer which attacked the Hornet from behind due to radio interference (5). You may see the foe in the picture if you have sharp eyes! Sven's model was re-kitted immediately, whilst Johan's heli flew again after having its feathers reshuffled - an amazingly strong little model! Picture 6 shows Henrik Torphammar's Saab Dragon heading off to the stars to land on the roof bars above, whilst picture 7 gives an idea of the scale - surprisingly large! This model is also built from Depron. Other interesting models at the fly-in were Sven Pontan's CO2-driven Cub (8), his novel Flying Euro Saucer (9), a very interesting TV heli (10 )owned by Johan Bjurling and built by Olle Sköld and (11) a scaled-up AMA Cub from an unidentified modeller. Pictures shot by Lars Winberg and Yngve Johannesson. |
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Here
is the opening screen of the club website from which you gain access to
the home page and main navigation menu of the site. Pages on the site
deal with the club history which I have somewhat condensed above, information
about the club today, joining procedures, pictures, links, location, copies
of The Prop Nut, the club newsletter, etc., although insofar as
pictures and the newsletter is concerned at least, nothing seems to have
been added since the end of the year 2000. There are some pictures of
some very nice models on the site, though, and you can see one or two
of them on our 
