In The Air
Sometimes dreams really do come true.
With eleven issues of the New RC Soaring Digest out there in the wild — and a reception by the readership better than I had any right to hope — I think it’s time for me to come clean about something. There’s no point in mincing words, so here it is:
I have no formal qualifications for editing the New RCSD.
Whew, that feels better. That said, my informal qualifications are utterly without parallel: an insatiable passion for the subject coupled with a modest talent for stringing words together in a relatively clear, inoffensive and hopefully mildly entertaining way. That and an uncanny ability to sit very still for long periods of time while moving only nine fingers. I also waded into the exercise with an unbridled optimism I could do the job — substantiated by next to nothing, as it turns out.
So with that haywire resume, it also stands to reason I had absolutely no clue what I would encounter when I started out. I likely still don’t know what’s coming down the road more than a few days out. I suppose it can’t be entirely beginners luck, though, that each issue has launched with more than its fair share of great content, the vast majority of it written by talented volunteer contributors whose writing and photography skills I hope to approach some day. If I’m lucky.
One of the few benefits of not knowing what the hell you are doing is sometimes you don’t realise what’s impossible. Or, stated another way, I’m probably too dumb to know any better when it’s clear I’m punching above my weight.
You can therefore imagine my profound shock when I asked one of my writing idols — Peter Garrison —if he might be interested in contributing some material to a future issue. And he actually agreed. Yes, that Peter Garrison, of Flying magazine fame. Since the late 1960s, his Aftermath and Technicalities columns in that fine periodical, along with his many feature articles and widely-read books, provide a rich syllabus of aeronautics knowledge any formal program would envy. Amongst Peter’s many qualities is a superior ability to take complicated ideas and make them very easy to understand. It’s the aeronautical engineering degree I was never able to obtain in real life.
My admittedly thin premise in approaching Peter was whether he might contribute source materials to help readers who are of the Power Scale Soaring persuasion build a PSS rendition of his iconic Melmoth design. The short version of the story is that you’ll find that material in the PSS Candidate | Melmoth article in this month’s issue. I also opportunistically use that same article to explain my personal obsession with Melmoth. I won’t repeat that here, but suffice to say for now it’s related to reading Peter’s article entitled The Compass and the Clock, which was published in the December 1975 issue of Flying. I was just 14 years old when I read it for the first of many, many times.
Don’t ever doubt the power of the written word to change lives. I can say with absolute certainty my life was never quite the same after reading that article, for reasons I attempt to explain in my PSS Candidate piece. I hope you, the readers, will briefly indulge me in the rambling prose therein.
I have always thought if you scratch an RC modeller you’ll find an aviator just below the surface. So for those who fit this description — that’s all of us, right? — here’s the blockbuster: in addition to his invaluable contribution to the PSS Candidate article, Peter also agreed to allow the publication of The Compass and the Clock in its entirety, right here in RCSD. I hope that this additional provenance will provide a powerful incentive for one or more (or many!) scale Melmoths to get built and flown.
If I can be permitted to say just one more thing on this before moving on to the other great content in this issue. While it’s not an entirely objective measure — I do, after all, have some influence over whose work appears in RCSD—having my byline appear in the same issue of the same journal as Peter Garrison is quite simply one of the great honours and priveleges of my life. It’s my equivalent of shooting hoops with Michael Jordan, talking movies with Tom Hanks or playing the back nine with Tiger Woods.
That, all by itself, makes me one of the luckiest guys alive. Sometimes dreams really do come true.
The editorial staff and I have come up with what we think is a bumper crop of great stories for this issue. First, we have a great new first time RCSD contributor: Marc Panton arrives on our pages with a comprehensively-illustrated and well-written tutorial called What a Tool! Servo Templates for Dremel Rotary Tools. Welcome aboard Marc, and we hope it’s the first of many. Along with Marc, we also have another ‘first timer’: Rex Ashwell who contributes Going Postal. Actually, first timer is only true for the New RC Soaring Digest. Many of you will recognize Rex’s name from his many articles in the legacy RCSD. It’s always a thrill when a well known and respected contributor from the latter makes the leap to the new, digital-first publication.
We have very welcome return visits from a long list of past contributors: John Marien follows up his very popular Cross Country Soaring with a Rabbit with a deep dive in Re-Envisioning a 30-Year-Old Classic Cross Country Design; James Hammond provides Part IV of his acerbic series So You Want to Be a Composite RC Sailplane Manufacturer? Harry Curzon has written up a primer on an exciting new capability of Jeti transmitters. Peter Scott’s third part of his Kinetic series is also out, this time looking at its relationship to L/D ratio. As I’ve said to Peter, if he had been my physics teacher in high school, things might have turned out better for me.
We also have our ‘foundation’ contributors: our regular visit from Norimichi Kawakami with the next buildlog instalment for his magnificent Mita 3 — part eight of twelve. Tom Broeski is also back with another tip with its usual high quotient of “that’s such a great idea!” Bob Dodgson adds to The Dodgson Anthology with an article which combines RC gliders and motorcycles. If he had somehow managed to shoehorn beer into the mix, he would have hit the journalistic trifecta for RCSD’s core demographic. But two-out-of-three ain’t bad and as always, Bob’s article makes for exceedingly entertaining reading.
Well, that’s it from the cluttered mind and desk of your Managing Editor. Please click the link below and head off to the first article in our November 2021 issue and, as always, please let us know how we did. And, seriously, thank you so much for reading.
Fair winds and blue skies!
Cover photo: For the November issue, we’re featuring this idyllic, late summer photo by Erik van der Kooij of his kids Lisa and Jelle retrieving Erik’s ASH 26. It was taken in the Netherlands in 2010 and is used here with Erik’s kind permission.
Here’s where you can find the first article in the November, 2021 issue. Or go to the table of contents for all the other great articles. A PDF version of this edition of In The Air, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
