🚀 go-pugleaf

Anyone out there fly RC helicopters? In our club of about 80 members,
we have 4 that fly machines. I have accumulated several over the past
few years, my favorite is the Graupner 212 and the Schluter Heli-Boy.

I actually learned on a Schluter Cobra in 1973. That was a big machine,
no collective pitch and took a little time (6 months) to master. I have
had my share of disasters with it, but still have it and still fire it
up on occasion just for kicks. The response is so slow on it, that it
is not really fun to fly after having time on the more modern machines
with collective pitch.

I live in Illinois, but once went on vacation to Denver and took along
a machine. I flew it at the site of one of the Denver clubs, and found
that the mile altitude at ground level had a profound effect on the
abilities of the machine and I had to re-adjust everything to make it
fly very well at that altitude. Living at that location has it's draw-backs
when it comes to flying RC.

I also have various fixed wing planes, and have done glider towing with
one of them, pulling a home designed glider built by one of the other
members in our club. That is really a challenge and is a lot of fun.

Our club is an active club, and we have two blacktop runways on a site
built on an old land fill. It took about three years to get the place
looking like anything, but now we have a real nice site and are going
to put in an RC car track in the spring. There is not one in our locality
and there are several kids that mess with the cars. We thought we would
help them get off the streets and out of the parking lots by doing this.
When at that age, funding is a problem and they can not afford such
luxuries. We are only a couple of miles from the city limits, which they
can get to if they find it attractive. Time will tell.