The Trailing Edge
We’re trying to build a bigger tent.
It’s always a shock how quickly we arrive at this point — another issue of RCSD has come and gone. We really hope you enjoyed what you found this time ‘round.
Our Feature Photo
As regular readers likely know, we use The Trailing Edge to feature just one photo we think captures that ‘end of a great day’ feeling that many of us have no doubt experienced. The pure delight of searching for this image is that just when we think we’ve seen the best picture which captures this particular moment — and that there can’t possibly be any others — another one comes along which kinda takes our breath away. So it was with this month’s contribution from Raymond Esveldt, above.
Raymond also contributed a great photo for In The Air this month, as well a helpful article entitled How to Create Spectacular Multishot Photos (see Resources below, for the link). He is indeed prolific and we thank Raymond for his many efforts — and we hope to see his work back on these pages in the future!
RC Soaring Adjacent
Two of the articles you might have found in this issue are what we call ‘RC soaring adjacent’: Gary Fogel’s historical deep dive with Albert E. Hastings | America’s First National Glider Champion and John Patterson’s Glider Mail. We hope you enjoyed them as much as we did. But for those who might still be looking for the precise connection with RCSD’s core focus of RC soaring, we can actually save you some time and further frustration: there isn’t any. Well, apart from the very obvious one: which is gliding, of course.
We have done this before, with some success. There are those who thought Peter Garrison’s The Compass and the Clock was a real stretch from gliding. But the connection is there if you know where to look. In fact, it’s explained in Terence Gannon’s PSS Candidate | Melmoth in the same issue. We’re happy to report the vast majority of feedback we received was that these two articles were a happy diversion and a welcome detour. This is leisure reading, after all. We think a great story — even if it tip-toes away from the main subject matter — is still very worthy of inclusion in RCSD.
The beauty of it? If you disagree with our philosophy then — tap! — onto the next story. RCSD’s digital-first philosophy means we’re never going to run out of space. Stories like the ones exemplified above will never displace stories that may well be more closely with your interests. It’s not a zero sum game. It’s win-win.
However, rest assured that it’s a carefully thought out and very deliberate strategy. We’re trying to build a bigger tent. We think by diversifying our story mix just a little — in as many ways as we can, including the way described above, is the best approach to attract more people to this thing we love to do. So we’ll continue to look for these ‘adjacent’ stories in the future.
New in the RCSD Shop
Ah, the best laid plans. When we embarked on this venture—the RCSD Shop, that is — we had such grand plans for how we were going to release the current month’s RCSD Cover Photo T-Shirt in, y’know, the current month. However, as Mike Tyson was to have said: “everyone has a plan until they get punched”. So let’s just say the dizzying array of tasks required to bring each issue of RCSD to you every month has made us a little punch drunk. So now we’re playing catch up: here’s the September 2021 edition. We manufacture and ship worldwide. Get yours today and help RCSD remain a commercial-free, pristine reading experience forever.
Make Sure You Don’t Miss the New Issue
If you don’t want to miss the May issue of the New RC Soaring Digest make sure you subscribe to our Groups.io mailing list or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. And please share RCSD with your friends — we would love to have them as readers, too.
That’s it for this month…now get out there and fly!
©2022 The NEW RC Soaring Digest Staff
Resources
- How to Create Spectacular Multishot Photos by Raymond Esveldt, April 2022.
- Albert Hastings | America’s First National Glider Champion by Gary Fogel, April 2022.
- Glider Mail by John Patterson, April 2022.
- The Compass and the Clock by Peter Garrison, November 2021.
- PSS Candidate | Melmoth by Terence C. Gannon, November 2021.
Read the previous article or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
