Three of us were flying Tuesday: Dave North, Egor Chibisov and me.

When you fly with others, you quickly sort out airspace. At least that usually happens. Someone flies low, someone flies high, someone flies farther out.

As you fly, you notice what other people are doing and try to stay within a predictable space. It’s a dance, and not nearly as hard as a tango.

There are flyers who defy any predictions and zoom across the entire sky, often at high speeds. When they fly, I like to take a break.

This wasn’t one of those times.

Easy to See. I hadn’t flown before with Egor, but he was flying a Super Zoom, a sedate foamy, practicing 3D maneuvers. The plane was easy to see and he wasn’t moving all over the place.

So we’re flying, and flying some more, and flying some more and then, smack, I hit his plane.

It was my first mid-air collision in two years of flying.

I hadn’t noticed that he had drifted into my airspace and my reflexes weren’t fast enough to avoid contact when the planes converged, so my propeller chewed into his tailfeathers.

His plane plummeted down, accompanied by bits of macerated foam.

I circled around and landed my plane, apologizing.

“We couldn’t do that if we tried,” he laughed.

I felt better.

Difficult Feat. He’s right, too. When I watch people flying aerial combat, I rarely see any contact. It’s very hard to align moving objects in three dimensions at a distance.

We walked together around the site of the crash, looking for bits of foam. He was very good at spotting them.

Egor found most of the pieces and began reassembling his plane on one of the picnic tables. But he was still missing a few bits.

My MiniMag was superficially OK, except for a broken propeller. But when I tried to start the motor, it stuttered. That familiar sound told me that one of the three wires from the speed control wasn’t completing its circuit to the motor.

Unfortunately, I had hot-glued the wires into the fuselage to keep them out of the way. Bad idea. Very bad idea.

I dug into the glue and peeled the wires away from the foam. Hooked up a battery. Dave held the plane while I advanced the throttle. Stutter-stutter-stutter.

A Case of Hiccups. As the motor continued to hiccup I moved each wire in turn. Red. White. Suddenly the motor came to life when I moved the black wire, then resumed hiccuping when I moved it again.

That was enough information. The speed control was OK and the motor worked, but the MiniMag wouldn’t be ready to fly until I completely dug out the wires and checked all the solder joints.

(The next day I discovered that a solder tab had broken off my motor. I repaired it and have since flown the plane.)

Meanwhile, Egor was out walking the Great Meadow again, looking for the last pieces of the puzzle.

He found them and was able to glue his airplane back together and fly it later that same day.

Friday, he and I were flying together again. Snake-bit, I kept a very respectable distance, off to the left of everybody.

I tried a touch & go — a landing followed by a take-off — but when I tried to take off I careened over and broke my propeller.

So I was headed to the picnic tables when I ran into Egor.

“My plane is stuck in a tree,” he said.

“Come with me,” I said. “I have a slingshot.”

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Flying, People, Radio Control, Tools, Trees.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.