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 Did you know that
Citizen-Ship Radio was a division of Curtis Dyna-Products
Corporation - the company that produced the Dyna-Jet engine? Me neither. This uniquely
done full-page advertisement from a 1971 issue of American Aircraft Modeler
broke the news. I'm not sure when Citizen-Ship stopped making radio control gear,
but it couldn't have been too long after 1971 because they didn't appear in the
model airplane magazines much after then. Cutris Dyna Products, by the way, is still
in business producing fogger machines for crops, special effects, and other needs.
...
 At QuinStar, we're about more than millimeter-wave
technology. The people comprising QuinStar Technology pursue diverse and exciting
outside interests. Our Chief Engineer, Jim Schellenberg, is a highly skilled amateur
astronomical photographer. He captured this beautiful image of the
Orion nebula using a specially modified Canon 6D. The camera responds
to the H-alpha spectral line at 656 nm (from hydrogen gas), which is seen as red
in the photo. The camera is mounted on an 11-inch telescope that tracks the object
as the earth rotates. This image consists of nine one-minute exposures that are
"stacked" to form the image you see. This is an excellent time of the year to view
the Orion nebula. It can be seen with the naked eye ...
 It's hard to imagine a time when contemporary
news on aircraft development included the Convair
B−36 Peacemaker bomber. The maiden flight was just 11 years before
this piece appeared in a 1950 issue of Air Trails magazine. I have always
wanted to build a control line model of a B−36, but like so many other some-day
projects, it will probably never get done. A guy named Joe, who lives at the end
of my street here in Erie, Pennsylvania, was a B−36 crewman during the Korean
War era. Joe is in his 90s now, and drives a Ford Mustang. Vanderbilt University
professor Franklin Farra has an interesting wall-wood flying wing sailplane that
he plans to fly someday. Based on the fact that there are none like it on the circuit
today, the concept probably never took off. It might make a interesting scale model
project ...
 18-year-old Nikodem Bartnik, who lives in
Poland, conceived of, designed, and built the amazing
motor thrust measuring test stand using inexpensive
Arduino components. A load cell
is used for measuring thrust, and current and voltage sensors allow those values
and power to be displayed. Mr. Bartnik provides all the files needed for the
PCB, motor mount / load cell stand, parts lists, and software code needed to run
everything. The entire project should be able to be built for under $100. Higher
capacity load cells and current sensors can be purchased if you need more thrust
capacity. I saw this in the "AMA Air"
weekly newsletter ...
 Ready-to-Fly (RTF) and Almost-RTF (ARF) models
are the overwhelming majority of models being flown these days, but an effort is
being made by the
Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) and companies like
Old School Model Works
to attempt to get more modelers building their airplanes either once again or for
the first time. Precision, interlocking, laser-cut sheet balsa and plywood parts
and a minimum of carved balsa parts make building much simpler than with vintage
kits. Having built many kits over the decades, including some of the newer kits,
I can definitely attest to the higher quality of today's products. Some of the old
designs have been re-engineered to make building easier. Covering, even with iron-ons
like Monokote, is probably one of the biggest barriers to building models. One solution
might be for companies to try providing slip-on sock-type coverings that can be
tacked on with an iron and then heat-shrunk. Remember you read that here first ...
 "Israeli composite airplane will be powered
solely by electricity.
Hartzell Propeller announced it has entered into a partnership
with Eviation to produce customized propellers to drive the company's electric commuter,
an 11-seat airplane called Alice, currently in the development phase. The airplane
will be powered solely by electricity stored in high-energy density batteries with
motors spinning three five-blade carbon fiber pusher propellers approximately 65
inches in diameter that include nickel cobalt leading edges. The props have no life
limits and will be attached aft of the tail and wingtips, a configuration the company
claims enhances efficiency. The technological advancements that go into Alice go
beyond electric propulsion ..."
 Not
everyone is an ardent observer of astronomical events, but most people are still
as awestruck as were primitive peoples when a lunar eclipse or solar eclipse occurs,
or when a massive meteor shower happens. Centuries ago most of those phenomena were
not predicted because the mathematics and mechanics of gravity were not known. The
kings' best astronomers and astrologers leveraged ignorance to influence ruling
policy similar to how politicians and activists do today. The folks at the Telescopic
Watch website created this infographic titled "Must-See
Stargazing Events for 2019" which highlights the 10 most significant astronomical
events of the new year. First up is a total lunar eclipse on January 21st ...
 "Vintage aircraft enthusiast Dieter Morszeck
is ensuring the future manufacturing of the stunning
1920s Waco biplane. Waco Aircraft Yet another legacy airplane
manufacturer has been sold - Waco Aircraft Corporation. This time, it wasn't a Chinese
company that swooped up the assets of the company, which was established in Battle
Creek, Michigan, in 1983 to revive the classic 1930s open cockpit biplane design.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Dimor Group Inc. bought the company this month. Dimor
Group Inc. was established this year as a subsidiary of Cologne, Germany-based Dimor
Aero - a company that was established less than a year ago. Behind the company is
Dieter Morszeck, the grandson of the founder or Rimowa ..."
 This
U.S.S. Arizona
battleship model was built and painted by my son, Philip, who was 10 years old
at the time. It is the stock 1/426th scale U.S.S. Arizona Revell kit. Spray cans
of Testors enamel paint were used for the hull and deck, and the small Testors bottles
of colors were used for the airplanes and detail work. His effort paid off with
a 1st Place ribbon at the 2005 Dixie Classic Fair in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Philip was at one time an ardent World War II history enthusiast, being especially
interested in the naval battles of the South Pacific ...
 Living in Erie, Pennsylvania, there are a
lot of days that are too windy for comfortably flying the gliders and 1/2A-sized
models I build. If the weather forecast says the winds are in the double digits,
I stay grounded. Sometime if it has been a couple weeks since winds and/or rain
and/or snow has prevented flying, I'll brave a 12-15 mph wind just to get in
some stick time, but the experience is not particularly enjoyable. It is good practice
for maintaining control of your ship in the event of unexpected gusts, but certainly
not the preferred environment. Contest flyers have to learn to be good in all weather,
which is probably part of why I never competed. This article about building and
flying kites in winds too high for flying models is a good idea.
The designs presented by author William Paxton are more sophisticated than most
people would undertake to build. Simple kites are still available at drug stores
and of course ...
 "Worldwide avionics sales for business and
general aviation aircraft in the first three quarters of the year were up a 'robust'
15.5% from the same period last year and totaled more than $2B, said the Aircraft
Electronics Association. Retrofit and forward-fit markets each registered double-digit
sales increases compared to the first nine months of 2017, AEA said upon releasing
its third-quarter 2018 Avionics Market Report. The two avionics market segments
registered respective 14.7% and 16.6% sales growth. The retrofit market refers to
avionics equipment installed after original production, and the forward ..."
 "The first part for the $247.5M
X–59 Quiet Supersonic Technology aircraft was machined in Palmdale,
California, Lockheed Martin announced November 16, a company official calling it
a 'great leap forward for the X–59 and the future of quiet supersonic commercial
travel' in a news release. This part, and many others to follow, will become a sleek,
single-seat jet that NASA aims to fly in 2021. The aeronautics and space agency
announced Nov. 19 that it has fully committed to the program and three-year timeline
to first flight following a key program review. That will make the QueSST NASA's
first new, supersonic X–plane in more than three decades. 'This aircraft has the
potential to transform aviation in the United States and around the world by making
faster-than-sound air travel ..."
 An article about Fred Reese's
Simple Citabria
appeared in the November 1984 issue of R/C Modeler magazine. It is a balsa
model that uses the constant chord Ace foam wing, with a span of 35 inches and a
flying weight of around 20 ounces when powered with an .049 engine (Black Widow
or TeeDee) and a miniature 2-channel radio. The foam wing panels were until recently
available on eBay, but not at the moment. Laser Design Service offers a short kit
of the Ace Simple Citabria if you are not into cutting your own parts from balsa
sheets. Steven Swinamer, who has provided similar photos for a few of his other
creations, sent along these photos of the building process of his Ace Simple Citabria.
If you haven't figured it out by now, Steve has a penchant for scratch-built, 1/2A-sized
R/C model airplanes. Says Steven about his Simple Citabria ...
 Eighty years ago - or for that matter just
twenty-five years ago - it was commonplace for magazine editors to print a "Merry Christmas" message to its readers. Thanks to a host of agitator
individuals and groups, doing so would likely trigger the snowflake gene and cause
a flood of complaints from the offended (often times otherwise uninterested people
who look for good organizations to corrupt). Editorial boards, unnecessarily desperate
to avoid the appearance of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and any form
of conjured up defamatory label, usually cave to pressure and change the very nature
of the publication in order to comply with demands. The longtime supporters and
actual readers are made to suffer and have their interests subdued in the process.
Good people rarely stand up ...
 "Aircraft racing, perhaps more associated
with the 1920s and 1930s, is still a major spectator sport, and it is moving with
the times. A recently - announced all-electric air racing series has taken a step forward with the formation
of a partnership between Nottingham University and the race series, Air Race E.
Planned to launch its inaugural race in 2020, Air Race E is envisaged as being similar
to Formula One pylon air racing, a competition where eight aircraft race directly
against each other around a tight circuit around 1.5 km end-to-end. Promoter Jeff
Zaltman, who runs the Air Race 1 World Cup, plans a race with electric aircraft
flying ..."
 How did we ever get stuff done before the
Internet, I ask only partially rhetorically? When it comes to vehicle maintenance,
I have relied on Haynes and Chilton manuals for decades, and with few exceptions
they have never failed me. However, when I looked up information on changing the
Rear Drive
Assembly (RDA) and Power Transfer Unit (PTU) lubricant in my 2011 Jeep Patriot
Latitude, the manual was useless. Fortunately, a few kind souls posted photos, videos,
and written advice on the best way to accomplish the task. As good as the information
was, I could not find a good photo of exactly where the drain and fill plug are
on the PTU (front wheel drive). Therefore, to return the favor provided by others,
I was sure to take some good, clear shots of the drain and fill plug location on
both the RDA and the PTU ...
 Snow season has arrived here in Erie, Pennsylvania,
already, and I didn't want to miss the chance to do some flying off of snow skis.
Last winter I mounted a pair of DuBro snow skis to my Herr Engineering J-3 Cub and
flew a couple times with them, but they were the standard model that are too big
and heavy for this 1/2A-sized model.
DuBro's
Park Flyer Snow Skis seemed like they might be a better choice for the J-3,
so I ordered a pair. The size is just about right, but the vacuum-formed plastic
was a bit too thin for me to confidently install them on the J-3. I decided that
they would be perfectly useable with a little sturdying up. As can be seen in the
photos, there are two stiffening slots molded into the skis, so I epoxied a 3/32"
x 1/4" spruce stick into each slot. Up inside the landing gear mount area is hollow,
so I shaped a piece of hard balsa block to fit, and then drilled through-holes to
accept ...
 The Baltimore Sun newspaper, published
not far from where I grew up near Annapolis, Maryland, carried "Flyin' Jenny" from
the late 1930s until the strip ended in the mid 1940s, so I saved a couple dozen
from there. While looking for the "Flyin' Jenny" comics, I ran across this comic
strip done to commemorate the attempted around-the-world flight by
Amelia Earhart. She and her navigator Fred Noonan, as you likely
already know, are to believed to have been lost at sea after taking off on June
1, 1937, from Miami, Florida, in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, heading east.
The last radio contact from Mrs. Earhart was received on July 2, near Howland Island,
in the South Pacific. Previous to her circumnavigation attempt, Amelia became the
first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in May of 1932 in her very recognizable
red Lockheed Vega 5b ...
 "In mid-November, a company called Rocket
Lab will try to send six small satellites into orbit around Earth - a fairly banal
undertaking, save for the size of the launch rocket. It is only 17 meters (56 feet)
tall and 1.2 meters (four feet) in diameter. And if all goes well, the US company
will send up more than one of its Electron rockets every month in 2019. Rocket Lab,
which was created in 2006, completed a successful test flight in January and is
expected this month to be the first of a new generation of companies to declare
itself operational in the so-called "small launch
industry." The launch window opens on November 11. Barring a mishap, or another
delay after a months-long technical setback, the rocket will blast off from the
world's first private orbital launch range in Mahia, New Zealand ..."
 I am in the process of building a Douglas
DC-3 control line model that uses a pair of ElectriFly Rimfire .10 motors,
and wanted to know whether it would be possible to use a single electronic speed
controller (ESC) for them. Unlike brushed DC motors with which you can - and I have
in the past - gotten away with
powering two motors from a single ESC, the brushless motors use
a three-phase signal that is both amplitude and pulse width modulated. Such a waveform
is not likely to be able to drive more than one motor properly, particularly given
the motor's interaction with the ESC due to its time-variable complex impedance.
I did a fairly extensive Internet search trying to find a definitive answer as to
whether it can be done, but they were all just guesses. Many people
seemed very knowledgeable on brushless motors and their controllers ...
 Like virtually every other aspect of modern
life, the editorial and production process of publishing a monthly magazine has
change significantly since the pre-personal computer days. Such was the case at
R/C Modeler magazine headquarters in the early 1970s
when this article appeared, although an IBM 360 computer was used for typesetting.
Don Dewey was the editor-in-chief at the time. Text was typed into the IBM 360 MTSC*
and got printed out in paper tape form that was a column width for page layout.
The layout person used a common "paper doll" approach to manually arrange all the
text and graphic on each page, which would then be used for magazine printing. The
entire process was very labor-intensive, and edits in content or layout could have
a major impact on the publication schedule ...
 Nowadays if you want to know whether a supplier
of model items (or anything else for that matter) has something in stock for shipment,
all you need to do is log onto the company's website and search. Or, you might prefer
to call since long distance calls are no big deal like they were back in the times
when everyone paid by the minute to talk outside of his local calling area. Not
so in 1972, when evidently I wrote to
Hobby Lobby International to find out whether they still sold any single-channel
radio control (R/C) systems. At the time I was just a few weeks shy of 14 years
old (based on the cancellation date) and my sole income was from a newspaper delivery
route (when papers were delivered on bicycles by teenagers rather than by adults
in gas-guzzling cars). I found this postcard mixed in with some old photographs
...
 My
Vise-Grip
pliers have performed a lot of hard duty over the decades. Many rusted nuts and
bolts would still be unremoved if it weren't for their sharp, corrugated locking
jaws. I have 10", 7", and 4" w/cutter, and 6" long nose models. These are all manufactured
under the Petersen Manufacturing Company name, before they bought Irwin, who now
manufactures Vise-Grips. Even high quality tools eventually show signs of wear after
decades of use and abuse. A few of mine had jaws worn down to the point where they
no longer would "bite" into the bolt head or nut being clamped. I was about to buy
a couple new pairs of Vise-Grips, but then wondered if I could recondition the jaws
to put the pointed shape back on the jaws with a triangle file ...
 Here is a great Christmas gift for a daughter,
wife, girlfriend, or other lady interested in the history of aviation. Keith O,Brien's
"Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation
History," is a tale of mademoiselles Florence Klingensmith, Ruth Elder, Amelia
Earhart, Ruth Nichols, and Louise Thaden. "Fly Girls recounts how a cadre
of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice
that conspired to keep them out of the sky." Truth be known, gaining prominence
in aviation at the time was very difficult for everyone - not just women, but certainly
women had a harder time simply because millennia-old societal expectations ...
 Normally when I see the title, "World News,"
I automatically assume it refers to "other than in the United States;" however,
since it appeared in a 1960 issue of Aero Modeller magazine, I need to
keep in mind that it likely means "other than in the UK." In fact, it does. Do you
ever wonder where all the thousands of incredible model airplanes that have showed
up in the modeling magazines over the decades are today? Some, of course, have crashed
and were trashed, as no doubt were the ones that were damaged in non-flying accidents
like getting stepped on, having a chair or box thrown on it, or some impish child
(or adult) decide it is a toy. Worst of all are the models that have been deliberately
tossed into the garbage bin because relatives had no need for them once their builders
/ owners died. Isn't it a shame to think that this Gee Bee racer ...
 "China unveiled on Tuesday a replica of its
first permanently crewed
space station, which would replace the international community's
orbiting laboratory and symbolizes the country's major ambitions beyond Earth. The
17-metre (55-foot) core module was a star attraction at the biennial Airshow China
in the southern coastal city of Zhuhai, the country's main aerospace industry exhibition.
Outside, China's J-10 fighter jet and J-20 stealth fighter wowed spectators as they
zoomed across Zhuhai's sky. Back inside, the country displayed its fleet of drones
and other military hardware. Crowds gathered around the cylindrical space station
module representing the living and working quarters ..."
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