Seven Baylands flyers traveled to Dublin, CA, Saturday morning to mix it up with four local Boomer pilots.

The Boomer is the creation of Boomer Butch, who cut down a Wild Wing, added a nose and tail with elevator and produced a highly acrobatic combat vehicle.

Led by Dave North’s analysis, we’ve simplified Butch’s design by eliminating the tail and elevator and added very efficient motors swinging 5-inch props.

Kevin Chin coordinated the event. Other participating local pilots were Butch, Paul Viscovich and Darren Sorce.

Baylands flyers were Dave North, Akkana Peck, Bruce Crawford, Larry Smith, Frank D, Mike Nadler and me. Chris Crawford came to watch and took most of the pictures you see here.

Blues Power. On the drive over, I chose a playlist of Chicago blues on my iPod. Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf fired me up for battle.

I walked 47 miles of barbed wire,
I use a cobra snake for a necktie
I got a brand new house on the roadside,
made from rattlesnake hide

Yup, that’s me!

Cloudy & Calm. Weather was overcast, but pleasantly warm. We had a light breeze most of the morning, gradually increasing by noon.

The local flying site is the Dublin Elementary School, which provides a nice big grassy area sandwiched between the back of the school and a brick wall hiding Highway 580. “Avoid the wall,” Kevin advised. “It’s just as magnetic as the trees at Baylands.”

Cloud cover washed out most colors, so plane identification was a bit of a challenge.

A bit of a challenge?

Where Am I? A huge challenge, exacerbated by the difficulty of deciding which of 10 planes in the air is yours. I lost track of my plane at least five times. At one point when I hadn’t seen it for 20 seconds, I decided that it must have landed while I was looking elsewhere, so I walked toward the magnetic wall. I quickly found it resting in the grass, undamaged.

Before Saturday morning, our combat sessions maxed out at six participants. Six is a lively number, offering lots of collision possibilities.

Suddenly there were 10 planes in the air!

A Funny Sight. My first impulse was to laugh. That’s a silly number of planes, difficult to take in. “Mine has blue fins,” I said to myself. Then repeated it, so I wouldn’t get confused.

We all shared a giddy excitement, maneuvering through the air, anticipating the inevitable collisions.

Oddly, we didn’t hit each other as often as I would have thought, but there were some excellent smack-downs.

We flew three intense massive combat sessions in the course of the morning.

Other Aircraft. Between battles, we flew other planes. Frank D brought his scratch-built twin-tilting-engine Osprey, which was a big hit. Butch showed off a 2.5-ounce scratch-built Micro Boomer, which flew well but was pretty twitchy.

This was too much fun, so in a month or two, when the planes have had time to heal and grow new healthy bones, we’ll do it again.

(Here are blog links on the subjects of Boomers and Wild Wings: How to Build a Wild Wing, Wild Wing: Boomer Redux, Boomer VTOL and Dave North’s Wild Wing.)

Tags: Baylands, Combat, Flying, Wings.

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