Party: Model Pattern Competition

Party: Model Pattern Competition

Pattern is modeller speak for aerobatics. Weather permitting, flying will start about 10am on Saturday and continue until late afternoon. It will resume on Sunday at 9am and depending on how much flying has been possible will finish after lunch or mid-afternoon. So far there are ten entrants, but this will probably double.

There are four classes, ranging from beginners like me to world championship standard. Sportsman class flies eleven set manoeuvres in alternate directions, with one free pass permitted, scored by two or three judge. The other three classes fly a continuous sequence of seventeen manouevres with three judges. The patterns are of gradually increasing difficulty for Advanced, Expert and F3A (used to be called masters) classes, and are flown in a 'box' 60° either side of centre and vertically.

Models are almost exclusively electric powered using brushless motors and lithium polymer batteries, which out-perform i/c engines and have other advantages such as constant weight (no fuel consumed, so no trim changes), engine braking on descent, and no mess from oil residue. Construction is mostly carbon fibre with laser-cut lite-ply or balsa framework, and sometimes foam in the wings and tailplane. The radios are something else, may have twenty channels or more (not all used for aerobatics, but more than you may think) and very complex mixing - setting up and trimming a model is a major undertaking, something of a black art.
The state body for this type of competition is
http://nswpattern.org.au/