Nationals results

[MMP]

I had to register to express my sincere thank to this forum. I helped coach kids of Marie Murphy on WS. As beginners last year, all the information and tips we learned here (particularly the posts from jander, great thanks) did help our planes tremendously to fly over 5 min this year last Saturday.

As for flying height, our plane flew up to maybe about ~80, almost touching the hanging metal (?) wires from middle skylight. The planes would certainly hit the top if we had used higher pitch prop.
It is hard to be perfect ... in our case, our kids could not find their lubricant bottle after checking in . They had to use whatever left-over lubricant in an old bag they brought in. They told me they put in 1,870 winds (I know, not a lot) in the 0.083" rubber for the 5:04 flight. Great experience for the kids.

Great thanks again for this forum.

[leetx]

Congratulations on a great competition! You broke 5:00, probably the only team in the country this year. Tell us how you guys did it.

Now come to Johnson City for the US Indoor Nationals and fly this plane. No bonus will be used at this competition. There will be other planes at the US Nationals that can break 5:00.

kleet X
SO Coach

[MMP]

A friend of the team took some photos of the plane, here they are:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkleeman/tags/wrightstuff/
Nothing special about the plane, as you guys can see. Kids and coaches spent most the time trimming, collecting data, modifying and back to trimming again in a 20-ft height gym with partial motors, and we mainly worked on trimming wing location, attack angles of wing/stab, prop pitch ... all of those covered in the past posts. If enough folks are interested in a video of the flight last Saturday, I probably can get somebody to upload it somewhere.

I was initially expecting more teams could fly over 5 min... there are so many good flyers out there. Probably not many of them could come to national.

The Marie Murphy team is particularly happy about the best ever overall team results .... 5th place. Considering this team of a small school from 6th to 8th grade (no 9th grade) with about 80 kids in each grade, this is definitely the highlight of their science olympiad history.

[jgan96]

Amazing! Geez I have a lot to work on to get there... i maxed out at a little under 3:20 .

Does anybody know what model/kit was used to win? Like Peck-Polymers or Freedom Flights etc?

Somebody should post a video.

[eta150]

MMP's was a freedom flight model. F.F. designed it after JC Booth's national winning plane from last year.

[MMP]

MMP's was a freedom flight model. F.F. designed it after JC Booth's national winning plane from last year.

Does our plane look that much like a freedom flight one? I believe our JV team built their planes with freedom flight kit (very good kit by the way), but varsity team did not use kit at all.

[eta150]

sorry
but yeah, it looks really similar to one. After a second look though, I can definitely see the difference.

[MMP]

sorry
but yeah, it's looks really similar to one. After a second look though, I can definitely see the difference.

No problem. Now after taking a closer look of some photos with airplanes built from kits, they do look similar. One varsity kid last year did try the earlier kit and was quite disappointed with it so this year we only used home built planes. It is impressive how much better this year's kits are. If we started from kits this year, it could have saved us lot of time. But then where would all the fun (tear+joy) be !

[eta150]

I know what you mean, I use a kit largely for the supplies, not necessarily the design. Whatever you did, it definitely worked. I think I actually met you at nats, and what I was most impressed with was how you could carve pieces out of the motor stick and still fly without torque bowing.

[MMP]

ok, if you got nothing better to do for 6 minutes, the video (up to 720p HD) of entire flight is now available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqt-FsekeqE