by kittyfritters » Sat Jan 17, 2009 4:27 pm
I spent last Saturday at the AMA Expo in Ontario, California as one of several volunteers working at the Build-Fly-and-Take table in the Blackseep Squadron area. We were giving away modified Skystreaks. You had to build one and fly it to take it. The Skystreaks were modified by having poly-dihedral wings, the tail put in with the grain vertical, and using lubricated, 1/8 inch flat, tan rubber motors. Ther were so many kids and adults at the table that we lost track of how many we built. I know that last year I help about 70 kids build them between 10 AM and 5 PM. This year we had about 30 left at the end of Sunday out of a shipping carton full of them. (Probably close to 1000 in the carton.)
The kids, even the teenagers and adults, were fascinated by using the wing-cracker jigs that we used to kick up the wing tips, having to glue the tips in place, (C/A and kicker) and gluing in the tails. In reality, building a Skystreak. Then when we showed them how to trim and fly them, indoors in the convention center, and that these simple models could be trimmed to climb up to the ceiling (about 45 feet) and circle around till the motors unwound, they were all but enraptured. Some of the adults thanked me since they had never been able to get these things (rubber powered models) to fly when they were kids. The most satisfying thing was to watch a teenager, attempting to appear "cool" and blase, getting cought up in the task of trimming a model and trying to get the best performance from it.
There was a long display table of models built by the club members including several Guillow kits. Dave Gee (Stuka Dave) was building a Dumas DeHavilland Moth during the show. My Guillow's Farichild 24 with the Gizmo Geezer front end on it was there and I ended up giving several demonstrations of how the free-wheel with clutch worked. Unfortunately, it's set up to fly at the Grassy Knoll and couldn't be flown indoors, but some proper indoor models were flown to the astonishment of the people there.
My favorite comment of the show was from an eleven-year-old boy. He was there with a girl, about the same age, and they had obviously been through the rest of the show and been impressed by the R/C models, some of which were big enough to be licensed as a sport plane and flown by an on-board pilot. He was looking at my Farichild and said to his companion, "It looks like a real model airplane, but it has a rubber band in it." She turned to him with an exasperated look and said, "It IS a real model airplane!" Minutes later, after they had been to the Skystreak table, and he had been shown how to trim a model, I could tell by the look on his face as he watched his Skystreak circle near the ceiling that he got it.
Are today's kid immersed in a virtual world? Yes, but it's amazing how interested they get when someone shows them how to actually do something in the physical world..
