The Trailing Edge
Wrapping up June and heading into July.
I said to Phil Cooke, who provided the beautiful photograph for this month’s edition of The Trailing Edge, “the only problem we’re going to have with this is convincing readers it’s a model glider and not the real thing.” But Phil tells the story so much better than we can:
“The moonlit Magister! Bob Jennings flying his 1.7m span PSS Fouga, built from the Island Models kit and complete with working nose light! The photo was taken well after 9pm during the last half hour of daylight at the end of a successful PSSA event on the Great Orme in May. The forecast for the following day was, by contrast, very poor and a small group of flyers elected to miss their evening meal and fly on until dark to capture the very most from the day. Slope soaring scale models can be so enthralling, it’s very difficult to leave the slope in such perfect conditions. De-rigging and loading the car in the dark is equally challenging as we soon found out!”
It’s a unique, moving and inspiring image, Phil, and thank you for the opportunity to use it. It conjures up perfectly the notion of ‘summer night’ as we approach the solstice and the attendant desire to stretch out a magnificent flying day as long as we possibly can. If we’re really lucky, beyond sunset and into the moonlight as the PSSA folks did.
Once again, we want to thank all those who contributed the great articles for this issue and to you, the readers, for reading them. Hopefully you wrote some Responses or added some Claps for the authors so they know you appreciated their hard work. June is done and the inexorable march towards July begins. For those who would like to contribute an article (or two, like Kawakami!) the July deadline is 2021–07–11. If it seems like these deadlines come really fast, it’s because they are coming really fast. By December of this year, we hope that issue and subsequent issues come out on the first calendar day of each month — very easy to remember and anticipate.
I guess the one downside with RCSD is all the advertising you have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Oh, right, there isn’t any. We think that’s the ideal experience for the reader and we’re quite sure you agree. However, that doesn’t mean RCSD doesn’t cost anything to produce — it costs quite a bit, actually. So you’ll forgive us if we hawk a little merch to help keep the wheels spinning and keep RCSD free. But you can help out, if you so choose, with the purchase of one of the soon-to-be-collectable RCSD Cover Photo T-Shirts. You can get the January, February, March and April editions now and May and June will be out shortly just as soon as we have our new, European-based manufacturing ramped up.
Also, we’re still putting together our Friends of RCSD program (previously known as the Corporate Sponsorships program). If you feel that it might be a program for you, with all of the corporate goodwill spin-offs that go with it, we would love to hear from you so please get in touch.
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So how did we do? Let us know your thoughts. Thank you all so much for reading and until next time…fair winds and blue skies!
©2021 The NEW R/C Soaring Digest
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