direction. The previous record was held by Peter Agnew from Melbourne for about 17 years and was beaten by 10 kmh. I guess we will see what sort of challenge this brings on.
Typically these days we tend to operate the events as more of a get together rather than any serious competition element. Although we do award prizes for different classes, the judging is mostly done behind the scenes. This year we put it back on the pilots to judge Pilots Choice, Best Scale model and Best sport model with our own judges awarding the Best Landing and Best Overall flight. In addition to these categories, we also had a new and innovative challenge this year called the“ Thrust O Meter”. This was a piece of engineering artwork with a accurately calibrated( or so Carl Hansen tells me) set of scales mounted to it to measure the thrust output of each model. The process involves the pilot nominating his believed thrust, compared to the actual reading on the Thrust O Meter. Whoever gets the reading closest to their nominated figure takes out the challenge. Certainly it created a lot of interest, but also opened a few eyes as well.
We were fortunate this year to have a generous sponsorship prize pool to offer with our awards from Z energy, Jet Centre NZ, Intairco, Traplett publications and Hobby City. They shared amongst the categories and awarded as follows:
• Pilots Choice – Jared Mulholland
• Best Scale – Colin Austin
• Best Sport – Roger Perrett
• Best overall flight – Stuart Hellyer
• Best Landing – Andrew Stiver
• Thrust O Meter challenge – Harvey Stiver
By mid afternoon we are in the pack up and clean up mode as quite a few of our competitors have quite a distance ahead of them to travel and others with early Monday morning airline connections out of Auckland. The arrangement MFNZ has established with Air New Zealand to assist the transport of models both domestically and internationally is a huge bonus. All of our international visitors followed the MFNZ required protocol and travelled with Air NZ. Every one of them spoke very highly of how well it worked and how easy it was. The extra baggage charge was minimal compared to the size of the boxes and in some cases not charged at all.
Steve Blackman with his 15 year old Panther
Paul Conner with his magnificent Airworld BAE Hawk
Dave Hodges with his Jetcat P160 powered Skymaster Phantom.
Thanks to all who participated in the event and enjoyed the weekend with us. If you missed this fantastic event you can visit the photo album put together by Steve Engle at: http:// sengle. smugmug. com / photos / swfpopup. mg? AlbumID = 28095877 & AlbumKey = b8MfBg
Anybody wanting any further information can contact us via our website at: www. nzjma. com or calling one of our contacts listed in the back of this mag.
Lew Woods with his scratch built vampire powered by KJ66. Lew racked up about 27 flights this weekend.