Martin Dilly 1

Nothing to do with repair programmes but well worth a watch is a programme on BBC Alba (the Gaelic language channel) called Bill agus an Spitfire. It went out on Feb. 20th at 2230 but you can catch it on I-Player. It's sub-titled and features a 90-year old brought up on South Uist who flew as a National Service pilot and later flew Rapides with BEA on the service to the Hebrides and Shetlands, landing on the beach before flying Viscounts and later wide-bodies with BA. His son finally gets him a flight in a Spitfire at Biggin Hill. The whole programme is slow-paced and laid back, without any of the contrived 'funny' bits that spoil so much TV today. In fact several of the Alba and BBC Scotland programmes are 'played straight' and don't seem to feel the need to bring in contrived bits of emotion or fake suspense. Worth keeping an eye on when you're not building.

Why the words do matter is that local borough councils and other national authorities have (or, in these straightened times, had.. ) funding available for local sports organisations. If we keep referring to model flying as a hobby or a pastime we’ve rather shot ourselves in the foot before we’ve started. If you don’t care that’s fine; it just possibly screws it up for other flyers and leaves still more for the footballers.

That pretty much says it. Having been involved for around 20 years in the negotiations that finally got model flying recognised in the early 1990s as a sport by the Sports Council (now Sport England) and the Central Council for Physical Recreation (now the Sport and Recreation Alliance) I can assure you that the semantics are actually important. When we took the first steps towards recognition of model flying as a sport we soon found that two major hold-backs were the title – Society of Model Aeronautical Engineers – and the words ‘hobby’ and ‘aeromodelling’. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies; stamp collecting, model railways or making a model of the Houses of Parliament out of a thousand matchsticks are pastimes that give people a lot of harmless enjoyment. Making model aircraft, whether Airfix plastics or ones that fly, can be a hobby too. But, as Fly Boy says, what we all enjoy is model flying and that is without a shadow of a doubt a sport; it’s a man-and-machine as well as a man-versus-the-elements one, whether we fly recreationally or competitively. Every time we fly a model, whether we’ve spent many hours building it or many pounds buying it, we’re enjoying a sport. It’s not a dirty word. It doesn’t imply cut-throat pot-hunting competition or trying to fly better than somebody else. If there is any competition then it’s you trying to make this flight just a bit better than your previous one. Why does this matter? Moast UK Councils have a Sports and Recreation Committee which can provide funding and facilities for local sports clubs, including model flying clubs, and permission to use sites. So please, please, please can we satop referring to 'the hobby' and give model flying the respect it deserves as a SPORT.

Staying on the Bond Minicar topic (thread drift?) Tony Young of the Croydon club was a British team member flying F1A glider at the 1965 World Free Flight Championships at Kauhava airfield in Finland. He drove there in his Minicar and took a spare Villiers engine with him as well as his model box, just in case. The photo shows him filling up at a Finnish gas station. Worth the drive, as Britain won the glider team trophy against 21 other countries.

Before this thread grinds to a halt or is euthanised could I make an important point. The words we use to describe what we do, in our case model flying, can have far reaching effects that can sometimes do us all a lot of harm. For instance, there’s nothing wrong with hobbies; stamp collecting, model railways or making a model of the Houses of Parliament out of a thousand matchsticks are pastimes that give people a lot of harmless enjoyment. Making model aircraft, whether Airfix plastics or ones that fly, can be a hobby too. But what we all enjoy is model flying and that is without a shadow of a doubt a sport; it’s a man-and-machine as well as a man-versus-the-elements one, whether we fly recreationally or competitively. Every time we fly a model, whether we’ve spent many hours building it or many pounds buying it, we’re enjoying a sport. It’s not a dirty word. It doesn’t imply cut-throat pot-hunting competition or trying to fly better than somebody else. If there is any competition then it’s you trying to make this flight just a bit better than your previous one. Why does this matter? Most local UK Councils have a Sports and Recreation Committee, which can provide funding, facilities for local sports clubs, including model flying clubs, and permission to use sites. In the early 1970s the first steps were taken towards recognition of model flying as a sport. We soon found that two major hold-backs were the title – Society of Model Aeronautical Engineers – and the words ‘hobby’ and ‘aeromodelling’. Because of the inaccuracy of the SMAE name, a working title of The British Model Flying Association was adopted in 1988. In our presentations to government we compared model flying disciplines with other sports, - combat flying and fencing, aerobatics and figure skating, free-flight and orienteering, - and got documentary evidence from numerous overseas nations whose governments already funded model flying as a sport. Finally in 1993, over 20 years since we first started negotiations, Sports Council (now Sport England) recognition finally came, benefitting all British model flyers. So, please, please, please can we all stop referring to ‘the hobby’ and give model flying the respect it deserves as a SPORT.

Since nobody else has bothered, here's the link. A couple of days to the deadline. https://bmfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/BMFA-Response-to-CAA-Call-for-Inputv2.pdf

Too late! They've been right at the top internationally for several decades. Just a few from the podium at free-flight World and European Championships in the past few years, - Andrjukov (now in the US team), Kulakovsky, Stefanchuk, Alexandrov, Babenko, Stamov, Verbitski, Vivchar. And they seem to have a pool of top-class young flyers as well.

Thanks, Leccy. Brain fade strikes again. Probably time for a nice lie down...

Yesterday there was a post that ended by mentioning "silly old duffers with boring toy planes" or words to that effect, to which I replied, urging people to respond to the CAA questionnaire. Both posts now seem to have vanished. As far as I am aware, neither was offensive. What happened?

Much more to the point, make sure to read Dave Phipps's comments and complete the CAA's questionnaire yourself. The deadline's Sept. 7th. It's a lot more ominous if the CAA get very few responses. Let's flood their in-box with sensible replies, preferably in line with those of the BMFA; model flying is by far the biggest air sport in Britain, so make the CAA aware that the people who take part in it care enough to offer their advice. Don't be one of the silly old duffers who didn't bother.

Peter F and others make a very important point. Many of us have never bought a model aircraft in our lives, but the tenor of the CAA proposals is that they are regulating a commercial product, ("product requirements", "manufacturer standards", "product labelling"); there seems a serious risk that unless we stress that many members of Britain's largest airsports organisation, the BMFA, have been designing and building the aircraft they fly and compete with safely for over a century (sometimeas it feels like that personally...) then they risk being legislated out of existence. The BMFA bumper sticker sums it up well, - Model Flying - Sport with Built-in Satisfaction. Many of the aircraft we fly weigh under 250grams, - F1B Wakefields for example and a lot of other free flight competition and recreational types, - and the imposition of any sort of remote ID device would be a serious weight and possibly safety penalty. The STEM benefits of what we do - designing, building and trimming an aircraft for the best possible performance - are too valuable to allow legislation primarily aimed at commercial products to swamp them.

Your merest whim is my command: try this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNC4Rk-_TFk

When you go to the multi-event Nationals at Buckminster over the August 27-29th Bank Holiday weekend whatever else you do, do make sure to take in the BMFA Centenary Exhibition in the Goldsmith hangar. Whatever you fly yourself, you’ll find there’s a lot more to model flying than that, and the sheer range of historic, successful and famous models will be an eye opener. There are the actual models that have won World Championships or set world records, models that you probably built when a lot younger or that got you hooked on our sport, as well as those that marked the significant developments in model flying that we take for granted today. With over 130 models from all disciplines, from a one gram indoor duration model that flies at less than walking pace, to a 29kg half scale radio glider that replicates the original exactly, there’s something to intrigue and fascinate everyone, so don’t miss the show; it closes on Aug. 31st and it’s free.