FAI-F1D
Free Flight Indoorist
I grew up in a rather unique environment for aviation. My first models were paper planes, which Mom taught me to make at age 2 and instantly regretted it. My dad held a private pilot's license, and Grandpa got (and used) his commercial on his GI bill in 1946. I was doomed from the start to live an aviation lifestyle, and this was only boosted by my dad's work to get his Instrument rating when I was 5 years old and the occasional slot together rubber band planes from Grandpa.
Dad introduced me to rocketry when I was 8 years old and the law of unintended consequences kicked in. I wanted to do the thing he'd never been able to figure out--put wings on them. To his alarm I was successful enough on my first try to completely fill my room with boost gliders in under a year.
I was 12 years old and my obsession with learning more about these machines let me across the internet where I stumbled upon Bill Kuhl's first website which described his Tweety Bird rubber powered flying wing which was giving him roughly a minute indoors. I couldn't believe a rubber powered model could fly that long and had to know more. It was then that I learned about something my brain simply couldn't process. Only two years prior, some guy named Steve Brown had gotten a rubber powered model to fly for ONE HOUR in a hangar in California. HOW??? How could he do that? How could anyone build a 40" airplane to barely over 1 gram? How could a propeller taking almost 2 seconds per rotation keep an airplane in the air?
I spent the next 13 years flying stick and tissue rubber models in contests all around the country. I would occasionally dabble in indoor across those years spanning high school and college, but though I could make a decent indoor model, I just gave up on the idea of building a one hour model since outdoor was what I was good at. All that changed in 2010 when I flew my Spruce Goose to a national championship win and realized I'd taken free flight scale as far as I could ever go with it. Something had to change.
In January 2011 I built my first F1D using parts I'd originally cut out a decade prior.
It flew well enough that I built another. And another. And another...
From 2011 to 2014 I spent literally thousands of hours building and flying F1D models to chase an elusive and seemingly impossible F1D national record, all the while working on my Ph.D. during daylight hours. I lost a lot of sleep. I got married and it got worse, but at least I had someone willing to do this crazy flying with me.
Contest after contest saw me return home disgusted with my inability to get anything more out of the planes, and contest after contest saw me show up with a new plane which occasionally boosted my best time closer to the record. Finally in late 2013 I had a series of test flights which conclusively proved I had a record capable airplane. We finally made it to a contest in February 2014 where I slid right past the record after only one failed attempt. I had done it!
And just like that the FAI changed the rules and stripped it all away. Oh well...managed to adapt set other records, the rest is history.
Now on to the relevant bit. After setting the impossible record, my flying buddy, Nick Ray, convinced me that anyone who could break that record could also break the then 18 year old Cat I Unlimited endurance record of 39:19. Yes, that's almost 40 minutes. In a gynamsium. With a rubber band. And no radio. And no thermals.
Nick built a plane in August 2014 and it flew well, but blew up during a flying session at Lakehurst.
Using his lessons learned, I built my own in late January 2015 and dabbled with it for the next three years, flying it to first place at the 2016 US Nats with a flight in the mid 20's and first place again at the 2017 Nats with a 31 minute flight, my first time ever to slide past half an hour with a rubber model.
I concluded that the insane unbraced wing just wasn't going to cut it and decided to build a big braced wing and a monster 25.5" prop. By November of last year this insane machine achieved 34:25 in our gymnasium flying site, less than 5 minutes off the record. I'm continuing to update this model. And that's why this thread exists. I want to break that record and then take the hour record--a feat only two people have ever achieved for a total of only three flights over the hour mark.
When I told Josh Bixler I was going for the hour mark, he told me it was time to tell the community about it. So here we are.
Several things are happening in this thread:
1. I'm going to build a larger horizontal stab for my Hourglass II Unlimited model.
2. I'm going to make a kit for it, and Hope is going to build one. I'll sell the other one to an undisclosed customer who has been wanting this thing for a long time.
3. I'm going to render Hourglass II hopelessly obsolete by building an indoor model at a scale that will completely change the standard for indoor flight performance. Well, that's what I keep telling myself. It's going to be crazy as it is. I've already spent $200 on covering materials alone.
There are major challenges associated with a big indoor model. Steve Brown told me his Time Traveler record model was constantly breaking and needing repairs (remember, this thing weighed only 1.1g, scarcely more than a paperclip). In the tradition of ultimate performance indoor models, he covered it with microfilm, he only thing that was available for that type of flying back then. It was so fragile that it was destroyed before he ever took a photo of it. Jim Richmond's Starwalker which achieved 59:59 suffered the same problems. Wondering what microfilm is? Check out the sheer insanity of it here:
Yes, really. Anywhere you touch microfilm, you WILL leave a hole in it. No joke.
This difficulty has let to an apparent physical law that no microfilm model over 40" span has ever set a record. They're too unwieldy. Too fragile. Don Sluzarczyk's 40"+ microfilm model actually caught on fire during repairs at the 2013 Nats. Similarly though, the events leading up to that fire were a hang up and subsequent crash involving substantial damage. Take a look: https://indoornewsandviews.com/2013/08/14/2013-usic-reporting-by-mike-kirda/
Max Zaluska came within 70 seconds of the hour mark in 2015 with a plastic covered model but it was destroyed when he tried to get it loose from the ceiling on a hang up.
John Kagan did achieve 61 minutes with a plastic covered model about 12 years ago, proving the advantages of that material.


Dad introduced me to rocketry when I was 8 years old and the law of unintended consequences kicked in. I wanted to do the thing he'd never been able to figure out--put wings on them. To his alarm I was successful enough on my first try to completely fill my room with boost gliders in under a year.

I was 12 years old and my obsession with learning more about these machines let me across the internet where I stumbled upon Bill Kuhl's first website which described his Tweety Bird rubber powered flying wing which was giving him roughly a minute indoors. I couldn't believe a rubber powered model could fly that long and had to know more. It was then that I learned about something my brain simply couldn't process. Only two years prior, some guy named Steve Brown had gotten a rubber powered model to fly for ONE HOUR in a hangar in California. HOW??? How could he do that? How could anyone build a 40" airplane to barely over 1 gram? How could a propeller taking almost 2 seconds per rotation keep an airplane in the air?

I spent the next 13 years flying stick and tissue rubber models in contests all around the country. I would occasionally dabble in indoor across those years spanning high school and college, but though I could make a decent indoor model, I just gave up on the idea of building a one hour model since outdoor was what I was good at. All that changed in 2010 when I flew my Spruce Goose to a national championship win and realized I'd taken free flight scale as far as I could ever go with it. Something had to change.

In January 2011 I built my first F1D using parts I'd originally cut out a decade prior.

It flew well enough that I built another. And another. And another...

From 2011 to 2014 I spent literally thousands of hours building and flying F1D models to chase an elusive and seemingly impossible F1D national record, all the while working on my Ph.D. during daylight hours. I lost a lot of sleep. I got married and it got worse, but at least I had someone willing to do this crazy flying with me.

Contest after contest saw me return home disgusted with my inability to get anything more out of the planes, and contest after contest saw me show up with a new plane which occasionally boosted my best time closer to the record. Finally in late 2013 I had a series of test flights which conclusively proved I had a record capable airplane. We finally made it to a contest in February 2014 where I slid right past the record after only one failed attempt. I had done it!

And just like that the FAI changed the rules and stripped it all away. Oh well...managed to adapt set other records, the rest is history.

Now on to the relevant bit. After setting the impossible record, my flying buddy, Nick Ray, convinced me that anyone who could break that record could also break the then 18 year old Cat I Unlimited endurance record of 39:19. Yes, that's almost 40 minutes. In a gynamsium. With a rubber band. And no radio. And no thermals.
Nick built a plane in August 2014 and it flew well, but blew up during a flying session at Lakehurst.

Using his lessons learned, I built my own in late January 2015 and dabbled with it for the next three years, flying it to first place at the 2016 US Nats with a flight in the mid 20's and first place again at the 2017 Nats with a 31 minute flight, my first time ever to slide past half an hour with a rubber model.



I concluded that the insane unbraced wing just wasn't going to cut it and decided to build a big braced wing and a monster 25.5" prop. By November of last year this insane machine achieved 34:25 in our gymnasium flying site, less than 5 minutes off the record. I'm continuing to update this model. And that's why this thread exists. I want to break that record and then take the hour record--a feat only two people have ever achieved for a total of only three flights over the hour mark.


When I told Josh Bixler I was going for the hour mark, he told me it was time to tell the community about it. So here we are.
Several things are happening in this thread:
1. I'm going to build a larger horizontal stab for my Hourglass II Unlimited model.
2. I'm going to make a kit for it, and Hope is going to build one. I'll sell the other one to an undisclosed customer who has been wanting this thing for a long time.
3. I'm going to render Hourglass II hopelessly obsolete by building an indoor model at a scale that will completely change the standard for indoor flight performance. Well, that's what I keep telling myself. It's going to be crazy as it is. I've already spent $200 on covering materials alone.
There are major challenges associated with a big indoor model. Steve Brown told me his Time Traveler record model was constantly breaking and needing repairs (remember, this thing weighed only 1.1g, scarcely more than a paperclip). In the tradition of ultimate performance indoor models, he covered it with microfilm, he only thing that was available for that type of flying back then. It was so fragile that it was destroyed before he ever took a photo of it. Jim Richmond's Starwalker which achieved 59:59 suffered the same problems. Wondering what microfilm is? Check out the sheer insanity of it here:
This difficulty has let to an apparent physical law that no microfilm model over 40" span has ever set a record. They're too unwieldy. Too fragile. Don Sluzarczyk's 40"+ microfilm model actually caught on fire during repairs at the 2013 Nats. Similarly though, the events leading up to that fire were a hang up and subsequent crash involving substantial damage. Take a look: https://indoornewsandviews.com/2013/08/14/2013-usic-reporting-by-mike-kirda/
Max Zaluska came within 70 seconds of the hour mark in 2015 with a plastic covered model but it was destroyed when he tried to get it loose from the ceiling on a hang up.

John Kagan did achieve 61 minutes with a plastic covered model about 12 years ago, proving the advantages of that material.
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