nats

Today was the first day of qualifying. This is the day that we start to find out how everything is stacking up. We flew two flights today and the best score counts toward the best score tomorrow. The two are then added together to determine who moves on to Thursday’s qualifying.

Today we started out with Slow Survivable Combat (SSC). George Pritchett was generous enough to loan a couple of planes to Nats newcomer Andrew Shkolik. That gave us four pilots to battle it out up in the sky.

Control Line (CL) Racing started off with the two juniors, Mason and Tristan Mayer, flying some practice heats and then a 100-lap final. Doug Mayer pitted for Tristan and Richard Kucejko was enlisted to pit for Mason. Mason and Richard were declared official winners with a 6:47.37 time compared to Tristan’s 7:27.97.

Monday started out cool with calm winds. Today is practice for those not entering the Old Time Stunt (OTS), Classic, or Nostalgia 30 events taking place on the grass circles.

Electric Formula 1 (EF1) was flown today. We had 44 registered pilots in this class. The planes are replicas of full-scale F1 racers. This is a spec class run on 4S LiPos and an 8 X 8E APC propeller. This electric class is our only electric event and, just as with 424, we run both a Novice and Expert division.

The final day of the 2023 Team Trials looked to be over by early afternoon, as just a mere twelve contestants remained. The short day turned out to be a very long affair, thanks to a record number of re-flights.

What a perfect day to start the Team Trials for the 26 hopeful candidates. The temperature was in the low 80s with just a whiff of wind, a blue sky, and no rain … yet.

Approximately 100 people, RC and Control Line (CL) combined, attended the Saturday night banquet. The program for the evening began with an auction of several donated items. The items included a set of plans, a Pica T-28 kit and retracts, a bottle of bourbon, and a bottle of wine. The auction netted a total of nearly $500 to be donated to NASA’s FAI team sponsorship.

Light rain quickly began to intensify shortly before the 8 a.m. pilot meeting, and it was apparent that flying was not an option, at least for the morning..

We were greeted with great flying conditions on Sunday, the last day to fly for Rounds three and four of the AMA events. With overcast skies and light winds, it didn’t get too hot which made getting good flights very possible for those who decided not to fly on Saturday afternoon.