 Propeller-driven air cars and boats were
popular in the 1950 and 1960s. They solved the problem of complicated and failure-prone
transmissions and had no traction issues regardless of terrain. Recall the James
Bond movies of the era that featured these vehicles regularly. As a teenager, I
built an air boat out of a block of styrofoam and a Cox .048 Babe Bee engine. A
rudder was controlled by my OS 3-channel RC system. It ran pretty well - nothing
to get excited about but it was my first radio-controlled model of any sort. This
CallAir Snowcar is a much more sophisticated type of vehicle and is actually
modeled after a full-scale propeller-driven vehicle. Call Aircraft made a few lightplane
models, including agricultural (Ag) types, under the CallAir moniker...
 "Its unusual shape helps it travel more miles
on a single tank of gas. Sky watchers in the windswept high desert town of Victorville,
California, have seen a dazzling array of airplanes over the past 80 years, from
the fighters and bombers that flew into the local airfield when it was George Air
Force Base to hundreds of about-to-be-mothballed airliners after the former military
installation became the Southern California Logistics Airport. But they've never
seen anything like the
Celera 500L.
Nobody has. Shaped like an elongated egg with wings and a stubby propeller hanging
off the tail, the 500L is designed to leverage the benefits of laminar flow - an
aerodynamic advantage that increases efficiency in flight by minimizing drag..."
 U-Control, aka U/C, aka Control Line, aka C/L,
is still very popular today even with radio control available. It is a great model
of modeling for those of us with bad eyesight who have trouble with tracking airplanes
at a distance. With control line your model is never more than about 70 feet from
you and there is never a problem with knowing which direction the model is headed
and whether it is right-side-up or upside-down. In 1960 when this Annual issue of
Air Trails magazine was published, R/C was mostly a rich man's sport, or
at least an electronics man's sport. Free flight and control line dominate aeromodeling.
Monthly features like "U-Control Corner" ran in model aviation magazines of the
era, and offered many great tips...
 I took the occasion of having to cover the
wingtips of my AAR-X1 electric control line model to make a short video of how I
cover a compound surface
(one that curves in two or three dimensions) with MonoKote. The only "trick" involved
is being daring enough to apply the amount of heat needed to exploit MonoKote's
extreme ability to shrink, while pulling on it to stretch it. By daring I mean that
it can take quite a bit of heat, even to the point of being dangerously close to
the melting point. It can also put the phalanges is peril while attempting to stretch
the MonoKote while heating it. In the case of these wingtips, there is an open framework,
but the method works equally well on solid compound surface. I have smoothly covered
carved sailplane nose blocks and curved wingtips using this method...
 "The research project at Nottingham University
has been funded by the Propulsion Futures Beacon of Excellence, directed by Professor
David Grant in collaboration with
Air Race E, an electric air race series, to investigate alternatives to the
use of fossil fuels in global transportation systems. In a statement, project lead
Professor Michael Galea said: 'Electric flight is one of the fastest developing
technological areas and is seen as the third-generation of aviation. The rigors
of air motorsport, with its demand for speed, performance and power management,
has provided us with the perfect conditions to develop and promote cleaner, faster
and more technologically advanced electric motor drives.' The Cassutt III petrol-powered
single-seater racing aircraft..."
 "After years of delay and frustration, the
James Webb Space Telescope is ready to launch. Sometime this fall, if the launch
date doesn’t slip again, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope - the most powerful,
expensive, and eagerly anticipated telescope ever to gaze out into the universe
- will lift off from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket. Twenty-six years in design,
delayed countless times, the JWST, as astronomers typically refer to it, will dwarf
the Hubble Space Telescope in size, resolution, and ability to see very faint objects.
Unlike Hubble, which operates primarily in the visible spectrum, Webb will use cameras
and spectrographs tuned to near- and mid-infrared wavelengths to view some of the
oldest objects in the cosmos, with a sensitivity 1,000 times better than past infrared
space telescopes..."
 These half-dozen hand-dandy
model building
tips are as useful today as they were in they appeared in the 1960 Annual issue
of Air Trails (Hobbies for Young Men) magazine. Readers submitted their
brilliant ideas to the editor, who then created drawings and brief descriptions.
I find myself doing many of the things that appear in this and of editions of the
vintage modeling magazines - of course that might have something to do with my being
"vintage" at this point in life (born in 1958). Back when these items were published,
availability of most tools and material was nowhere near as abundant as today. It's
hard to imagine anyone nowadays making a drill bit out of a nail, but in a pinch
you never know...
 Depending on the phase of the moon, the prevailing
wind, stock market activity, or the color socks I have on, my interest in airplane
activities alternate between radio control, free flight, control line, static display,
or any other aspects of modeling. Over the years, I have designed and built probably
four or five different field boxes to accommodate the mood du jour. Each was sold
before moving on to the next design iteration. Finally, I decided that rather than
keeping on making new field boxes, it would make more sense to design a one-size-fits-all
version. The Chameleon Field Box™,
as I have dubbed it, comes pretty close to achieving that goal. The design work
was done on Autodesk's AutoSketch release 6. I still have the file, but upon opening
it again after many years, I discovered that I never did put in all the detail for
the hardware...
 OpenRocket is a free, fully featured model
rocket simulator that allows you to design and simulate your rockets before you
build and flying them. Everything you need to design, simulate and fly better rockets.
Reliable simulations. Leverage state of the art 6-degrees-of-freedom flight simulation
with over 50 variables. Analyze all aspects of your simulation with advanced plotting
and exporting. Easily design your models with CAD technology. Replicate all features
of your existing model or new design. Everything from the density of materials to
the quality of finish on the outside of your model. Choose from a massive catalog
of existing components...
 "With conjunction over and our first flight
at 2,700 RPM behind us,
Ingenuity is ready to begin the journey back to the Wright Brothers Field at
the Octavia E. Butler landing site, before venturing beyond. The above figure depicts
the mission ahead of Ingenuity, which is to join Perseverance in the trek north
along the east edge of Seitah, before traveling west to reach the Jezero ancient
river delta. To accomplish this feat, the Ingenuity team is planning a series of
4-7 flights to return to Wright Brothers Field. Along the way the project is considering
preparing a flight software upgrade for our helicopter which will potentially enable..."
 This expertly rendered 3-view drawing of
the
Luscombe Silvaire appeared in the June 1959 issue of American Modeler magazine.
Draftsman Jim Trigs provided many such detailed drawings for modeling and full-scale
aircraft publications. According to this 2012 Capital Journal newspaper piece on
Jim Riggs, he flew from 1953 through 2008, with 28 of those 52 years devoted to
United Airlines. Being a South Dakota native, he was inducted in to the South Dakota
Aviation Hall of Fame in 2012. Jim soloed in a Cessna 140 in 1953 when he was 16,
then went on to log nearly 22,000 hours of flight time over his career. He flew
helicopters in Vietnam, and spent decades in the Civil Air Patrol - a true aviation
enthusiast. Jim left us in 1995...
 If you ever had any doubt whether Bill Winter
was one of the model airplane hobby's earliest and most prolific contributors, check
out this article that appeared in the January 1955 edition of Popular Electronics
magazine (only the third issue since its inception). Radio control systems were
just beginning to be commercialized and priced at a point where a lot of the public
could afford it. Quirks and high unreliability that plagued early systems had become
less of an issue so that airplane and power plant design efforts could take priority
with aeromodelers. In this article, Bill addresses setting proper
wing incidence
and engine thrust angles for good, repeatable, stable flight...
 "Tom Grundy, the CEO of Hybrid Air Vehicles,
started his career working on fighters and drones for BAE Systems, and he was a
project engineering manager for Airbus during the development of the A380. But these
days his focus is on a type of aircraft that can do things the fixed-wing fliers
he has spent his life admiring can't - even though the basic technology keeping
them aloft is substantially older. Welcome to the second age of the airship. Grundy’s
company is promoting its striking, pillow-like
AirLander 10, initially designed for military surveillance, as a pleasant, low-emission
alternative means of regional air travel. In May the company announced plans to
begin service for up to 100 passengers per flight on a handful of short-haul routes
(Liverpool to Belfast, Oslo to Stockholm, Seattle to Vancouver, among others) in
2025. A Scandinavian company is in talks about using the AirLander..."
 Two spacecraft built by Europe and Japan
captured their first up-close look at the planet Mercury in a weekend flyby, revealing
a rocky world covered with craters. The two linked probes, known together as
BepiColombo,
snapped their first image of Mercury late Friday (Oct. 1) during a flyby that sent
them zooming around the planet. The encounter marked the first of six Mercury flybys
for BepiColombo, a joint effort by the space agencies of Europe and Japan, to slow
itself enough to enter orbit around the planet in 2025. BepiColombo took its first
official photo of Mercury at 7:44 p.m. EDT (2344 GMT) with its Mercury Transfer
Module Monitoring Camera 2, a black-and-white navigation camera, as the probe was
about 1,502 miles (2,418 kilometers) away from the planet...
 Were you or anyone you know - father, brother,
son, uncle, nephew, grandfather, friend, enemy - attend the
1974 National Miniature Aircraft Championships (NATS) at Lake Charles, Louisiana?
Why that location was chosen for a mid-summer event is beyond me, but the NATS were
held there a few times. John Clemens was Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) president
at the time. I had just become aware of the AMA a few years earlier at the ripe
old age of about 13. After 63 years on Earth I still have never experienced a NATS
- or the Toledo Show for that matter (which, alas, is no more). I have managed to
visit the AMA Headquarters in Muncie, Indiana, twice, though, but that was nearly
two decades ago shortly after they opened. ...but I digress. Here is a thorough
accounting of the goings-on at the 1974 AMA NATS as presented in the November 1974
issue of American Aircraft Modeler magazine...
 Since there is a lot of wisdom conferred
each month upon the model aircraft magazine reading public, I thought it would be
of service to scan, OCR (so you can search the text), and post some of the articles
from vintage American Aircraft Modeler magazines. This first is the "Walt Mooney on Free Flight,"
from the January 1974 issue. One item is how a flying club near the Miramar Naval
Air Station (of Top Gun fame) lost its site because someone (a non-member) flew
an R/C glider at high altitude during a full-size training exercise, thereby disturbing
the program. Eventually, all kinds of aeromodeling will be covered including free
flight, control line, and radio control. Stay tuned for more to come...
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