2013 Scale Masters Championships - Woodland/Davis California

[Michael]

Apparently no one has posted about this on our website yet, so I'll be happy to start it off.  Kudo's to the Woodland/Davis Aeromodelers for an beautifully run Championship event.  The field was an excellent flying site and had been manicured in preparation for the event. Compliments to Jeff Lovitt the cool, calm, and unruffled Contest Director and also to Jeff Whitney the Asst CD. Heartfelt congratulations to Mitch Baker, who was selected as the prestigeous Harris Lee Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.  Mitch served well at the Champs doing the registration, scorekeeping, still picture taking, live feed monitoring, etc.  His equipment area had multiple screens, computers, keyboards, printers, cameras, mice, scanners, etc and looked pretty much like NASA's mission control.  The Woodland/Davis Aeromodelers were the real story, however, and they were friendly, helpful, committed, and worked hard to make sure the Championships were a great experience for the contestants.  Hats off to all of those guys & gals.

[j_whitney]

Thanks Mike for posting.  The real story as you said were the Woodland-Davis club members and the GREAT contestants.  Mitch has links to the event on the home page here that will answer most anybody's questions.
Congratulations to Tom Wolf, Gus Stutsman and John Cole for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in Expert - and of course Tom is now Grand Champion.

[j_whitney]

Not to forget Team or the other classes, just don't remember them off the top of my head . . .

[Michael]

The team scale winner was Will Holderness flying Tim Albright's Nieuport 28 and they were a newer entry to the class.  Bill Adams/Wayne Frederick and Curtis Kitteringham/Ron Peterka were 2nd and 3rd respectively.  Congrats to all of you guys.  There were 6 entries in the class this year, which hopefully signals a resurgence of interest in Team, which at one time had more than a dozen entries.

Jack Diaz, Bill Adams, and Anthony Ogle (from Australia) took the top three respective places in Pro/Am Pro.  Anthony had an interesting story besides travelling all the way from 'Down Under' to compete.  Anthony had brought a really nice 92" P-47 Thunderbolt to fly in the class and had a radio failure in practice on Thursday that destroyed the model.  Ken Shapiro, one of the Woodland/Davis guys, stepped up and loaned Anthony his RV-4 to fly in the event, and Anthony flew that unfamiliar model well enough to garner third place in a field of 18 contestants.  Awesome work, Anthony, and Kudos to Ken for being a stand-up guy and saving Anthony's experience at the Championships.

[Michael]

I didn't mean to forget the newest class at the Championships, the Pro/Am Sportsman class.  This is the entry level class for first time contestants and was won by Derek Micko flying a modified foamy Me-262 electric jet.  Second place was Dave Lloyd with a spacewalker and third was Dylan Baltazar, a 10 year old lad flying an electric P-47 Thunderbolt.  Dylan was also the recipient of a Young Eagle award sponsored by the One Eight Air Force and has received lots of press at RC Universe and also some recognition on the AMA's website.

Derek Micko is from Phoenix, AZ and first competed in the two Starter Scale contests we held late in 2012 and early in 2013 respectively.  He place second in one of the starter scale contests and first in the other.  Derek then went on to enter the Gunsmoke Qualifier and qualified for the Championships.  The model he flew did not come with flaps, but before he went to Championships, he added that functional feature to the Me-262 to improve his flight realism scoring.  I think we will be seeing more of this guy in the future.

[samwright]

I am so impressed that I am hooked big time on scale competition.  The Woodland Davis Aeromodelers have a fantastic facility and the club members were there to help including efficient staging for your flight order.  I am always the announcer at these events and this time I flew. While my main 96" P47 met with a disaster, #2 was not ready in time. I took an ARF RV8 and soon realized I took a penknife to a gunfight.  But the experience and fun I had far outweighed getting my tail kicked by a 10 year old and he deserved that win.  Kudo's to the parents.

The Scalemaster's team did a great job and Mitch lived on the computer getting scores up quickly. I have to tip my hat to Curtis Kitterngham for running enough qualifiers and seminars on scale competition to get a lot of us off our seats to actually go to the masters.

If I can do it, so can you, and there should be no excuse.  yes, we know things are changing, and scale builders are a smaller group and ARF's are larger. But there is hope in a different form. There will still be scale builders like Tom Wolfe, and John Mota, and others with awesome masterpieces to inspire us to at least make the first step even if it is a modified ARF.

Did I mention the guy doing the announcing who also did a great job and I should know.

Thank you again Jeff and the Crew, as well as Mitch, Curtis, the judges (all of them) and everyone else that had a hand in this class event.

Humbly, and building for the next one a real scale plane....Sam