In a week of otherwise perfect flying weather — lots of calm periods and low-wind days — Wednesday was a thrill ride.

At 11 am, the wind was blowing from the west at 20mph, with gusts adding another 5mph or more.

When it’s windy, I’m most comfortable flying a wing. My current favorite is a 24-inch Mini SpeedWing powered by a three-cell 460MAh LiPo battery powering a tiny Feigao brushless motor spinning a 3.5-inch propeller.

It’s got enough oomph to push into big winds and its 6-ounce total weight, foam body and rear-mounted prop allow it to literally bounce back from even dramatic crashes.

Learning on a Wing. As I’ve mentioned before, a Combat Wing was the aircraft that enabled me to learn to fly, thanks to its resilience.

So I’m flying the Mini SpeedWing. Dave North is flying his slightly bigger Mini-Slofly wing.

He swoops at me and I zip off. Then I swoop back at him.

The wind has turned the air into a virtual roller coaster. At moments we’re standing still, frozen by the wind. Then we’re accelerating down a cataract of boiling air.

A Rock & Roll Day. We’re flying combat on this rock & roll day, chasing each other around the blue sky, soaring high and plunging back down.

Dave says that two wings can’t make contact with each other. He thinks that you need at least three or four before a collision is even a possibility.

In recent weeks, I’ve been also flown combat sessions with Mike Nadler, Gary Morgan and others, using profile foam planes trailing crepe streamers. That’s fun, but the planes break easily, even though plane-to-plane contact is not an objective.

Bumper Cars. Foam wings, though, are like bumper cars. If we ever disprove Dave’s theory and hit each other, we’ll just rebound, with no damage.

Aiming at each other, accelerating and hurtling through the air, we rush to where the other wing was a few seconds ago.

We each think we accomplish a couple of near misses. At least they looked like near misses from one angle, but they probably weren’t that close.

Sliding Down the Wind. I learn one good trick: go high, upwind, and then toboggan down with the wind in a quick slashing attack.

In combat, I realize, you stop worrying about orientation. You just don’t have time.

So you don’t care if you’re inverted, or going or coming. Somehow, it doesn’t matter any more, and yet you don’t crash. If you’re going in the wrong direction, you quickly change direction.

Those Darn Trees. Suddenly, though, I fly over my head, behind me, into the trees. I reflexively cut the throttle to mitigate the crash and turn around to watch the plane.

I see the wing in the trees and realize that I’m losing speed and altitude, though I’m still pretty high.

Just as Gary, who is standing beside me, says, “You need more speed,” I accelerate and calmly steer it out from the trees, into the wind and back over the Great Meadow.

Amazing. I never panic. It’s my best-ever flying moment.

Tags: Baylands, Combat, Flying, Radio Control, Trees, Wind, Wings.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 7:07 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.