The fun fly in South Australia was one of the best events I’ve attended. A huge thanks has to go out to Scott Borman and family along with all the SA boys for putting together such a layed back event. The fun fly was held at Scott’s property which just happens to be a turf farm. The bowling green presentation was second to none.

I arrived on the Thursday to perfect weather and got in a few flights to make the most of it as they had predicted good weather for the weekend. This was proven wrong as from Friday onwards the wind picked up to a constant 30 knots with wind gust around the 40 knot range. Even with these conditions we all continued flying and found new activities to keep the amusement going.

The helicopter wind generators was a classic, with one guy holding the model and the other working the pitch we got some amazing head speeds out of the models, all reaching idle up speeds purely from the wind. Scott put together a wood pallet and rigged it to the tractor for some double Synergy landing action. I must say the wind was off the scale and dirty air made the task even more challenging, but nonetheless we both made it onto the surface for the “Synergy Sandwich”.

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Hi Guys,
I just got back from the Indonesian Aeromodelling Festival. The event was held from the 15^th to 21^st of January. Scott Gray, Duncan Osbourne, Shinya Kunii were the other special guest pilots for the event. The first few days were very casual waiting for everyone to arrive in Jakarta. Scott and Lauren nearly missed the event due to a snow storm back home. The usual drive to the airport that normally took 30 mins was stretched out to 4 hours. Luckily they where able to make another flight.

It was about a 3 hour drive out of Jakarta to the event, which was held at the Indonesian Air Force base in Bandung city. I must say in all my travels I’ve never seen so many cars jammed into some tight roads and the people are extremely courteous and merging traffic runs like clockwork.

The major side of things at the event didn’t get under way until the last day of the event where the Chief of Staff of the Indonesian Military opened and closed the proceedings. This gave us guys some quality time to muck around flying as we pleased, which was most of the day and even into the night.

Scott’s Vibe was the first model to hit the ground lasting the best of 20 seconds. A little rise in the terrain took prisoner of the JR heli with no mercy. Not much damage and it was up and running again later that afternoon. That night, we did some night flying with Scott decking out the Vibe in some cool night gear. Scott put together a really nice flight and the cooler weather helped with the poor little motors producing some power. We were very high in the mountains so the high altitude and high humidity didn’t help at all. I was very glad I had a Trex 600 to beat up on in between Synergy flights. Duncan flew one of Angus Lie’s Trex 400’s kitted out in night gear which smoked itself in towards the end of the night.

Most nights Lukman, Angus and the guys would take us to restaurants in the hills for dinner. The tropical setting was picturesque and extremely relaxed. I think everyone there could have spent the week in that area.

Scott and Shinya put on a very nice 2-way F3C flights with some very nice choreographed flying and some very close-in flight contact which made for a exciting flying. Duncan, Scott and I did a three-way flight, with the standard “kiss of death ” takeoff then into some formation flying. We all came together for some tic-tocs. After a few, all three managed to get in sync with each other as they were pumped about in blue angel style.

After assessing the flight over dinner with some great photos, John at MHW we came to the conclusion that Duncan’s new call sign was “Premature pullout” as his heli didn’t even make it into the photo of the kiss of death! Scott came up with that one and I think we laughed most of dinner over it.

We sat down on the final day and worked out a really good flight plan for the last flight of the day, which on paper looked to be extremely exciting. Once the opening ceremony had concluded we were up for our flight. Duncan again was on the right, Scott was centre stage and I was on the left; With Duncan’s early pullout (I’m still laughing now…) in the back of our minds and John needing some quality photos for Model Helicopter World. Scott and I needed to keep things tight, hoping our good friend was going to give his Synergy some pitch to get it downwind a little. Well from there on things didn’t really go to plan. Scott’s model came slightly downwind, I was right on the centre line. Duncan manned up some and made it into the photo. Then Scott’s Vibe punched through the centre line with perfect timing with me being there at the same time. I’m sure the photos will explain the rest. Duncan managed to pull out after nearly flying through my tail boom which had been jettisoned his way after Scott’s Vibe had cut it off. Duncan finished off the flight in style and took one for the team. Ah… time to pull out the Trex 600 and Scott’s F3C bird for some flying afterwards.

I would really like to thank Lukman, Angus and everyone for at the event for making us all feel extremely welcome. It was really great to catch up and do some flying with the guys again. Till the next kiss of death!