The near crippling lack of engines on the market would be a big one for me. I fly wet fuel p.much exclusively. The engines are half the reason I'm even in the hobby at all so you can bet your bottom dollar I'm flying one whenever I'm in the air, and increasingly, I'm having to look on eBay, on RCGroups, on Glow Nation for additions to my collection. There's very little
new production for me. I like my 4-cycles and the only game in town for anything that isn't a 56, 62, 92, and IIRC 120 or 150, is Saito. And even the few OS 4-cycles we still get are distributed by Horizon right alongside the Saitos, so holy expensive.
I recently got my grubby little paws on an absolute gem of a Saito boxer and spent less on it than I would have on a brand new Saito twin that's nowhere near as smooth running. My Magnum 4-cycles, all excellent runners, acquired secondhand. My OS thumpers, second-hand. All of my two cycles have been secondhand purchases.
Matter of fact the last engine I purchased truly brand new was my OS 18 CV-RX way back in 2008-2009. Honorable mentions go to my RC Ranger Cox 049s and my Fox 049 FAI, but I don't quite consider them brand new because they used NOS parts and weren't sold to me by the original manufacturers.
C'mon, Hobby Industry. There's still plenty of us piston pounders out there. Throw us a bone!
Also, while I'm at it, I'ma rant a bit about flying fields banning glow aircraft on the basis of noise while allowing 100+MPH race wings that make my nitros seem library quiet in comparison. C'mon, use some logic here. If you're telling me I can't fly there because my 75dBA two stroke is too loud you shouldn't be allowing that Alatus with its 6s quad motor to zip along at 85+ dBA.
There's four fields within an hour's drive of me and only one I can actually fly at because of this ridiculousness. They allow electrics of all types, even loud EDFs and race wings, but ban Glow birds on noise reasons. iethjiethjitgjh. C'mon m8. My 4-cycles are quieter than every EDF in the skies! Even my 2-cycles aren't htat loud!...mostly...
ok my Cox engines are a bit loud and my Fox 049 FAI is so loud you need earpro to bench run it but they're exceptions to the rule...
Fun fact: This issue is why I will likely never attend Flite Fest until they start hosting it at Edgewater. I'm not driving several hundred miles to fly one foam biplane 3 or 4 times in the day and then watch a bunch of other people have fun while I have 3 cars and 12 other planes on display around me that won't turn a prop in anger because they're not electric even though they're quieter than some of the electrics in the air. I would LOVE to attend a Flite Fest but it just isn't worth my time if I can't fly my planes there.
Happily FPVFest is hosted at Edgewater and does allow fuel aircraft, so I'll just go to that instead.
Counter-rant: Technology being slammed down our throats at every turn for sake of having it.
I'm perfectly happy with where we are on our radios except for one thing: Interoperability. If there's one aspect of the AM/FM heyday I want back, it's that you could buy any brand Rx and it would work with any brand of Tx, even to the point of soldering your own together on a PCB you etched in your basement.
I don't want fancy tech in my car(aircon is about as state-of-the-art as I'm comfortable with for point of reference, don't even want fuel injection), so why would I want it in my RC system? I'm happy with 2.4ghz digital systems being basically shootdown proof and I never have any problem with brownouts on my S-FHSS and T-FHSS gear fed off LiFE packs.
If we were gonna tech up RC, I'd focus it on engines instead of bringing the Internet of
into our transmitters. A lot of the reason people moan and cry about wet fuel models is they're too damn lazy to learn how to take care of it, too damn lazy to learn how to adjust a carb. So why not pull the EFI system off their car and slap it on their model? OS actually tried it a decade or so ago and it worked a treat except for cost...
It's not as much a case of being oblivious(though a lot of people do have a 4GLTE set of blinders on most days), but more a case of having been brought up in a suburb. Suburban life breeds self-centered attitudes in all residents. As a Fed-Ex driver I see it every single day, buncha selfish -beep-s playing in the street like they're the only ones that ever have to use it, parking their cars END ON to the curb in their cul-de-sacs, leaving their basketball goals in the street, all manners of proof that they don't care about anyone else but themselves.
And no, I'm not being facetious about the parking.
View attachment 170007
It happens
constantly. I see 4, 5, 6 people parked like this every workday.
And you're seeing that at your field. These kids don't care about anyone but themselves. They're raised in an environment where parking like in that picture is considered acceptable, where self-centered behavior is the norm. They want to sit on the runway
so that's bloody well where they will park their arses. Ask 'em to move and they read you the riot act like you're trying to put them in a cell or sommat. They don't care that it's not safe, they don't care that you might need to use that runway. They've been raised around everyone and everything else having to give way to them, it's all they know.