~ Lloyd Bruce
Friday, September 2, 2011
Spatano Water Pop
John Dana submitted an old photo of his that brought back a flood of memories:
I remember well the airplane I'm launching in this photo. It was an early-1970s Spatano stick gerper on styrofoam floats (hand-carved, I think -- or maybe cannibalized). It had double rudders and a short solid-wood wing pylon. It was a poor performer -- never came close to ROWing. I later rigged it with a "helicopter assist" (i.e., a small, short-duration, gerp-powered prop pointing almost straight up but tilted slightly forward). The idea was for this device to give it enough upward umph to break the surface tension so it could get off the water and then fly normally using only the power of its main gerp moter. Didn't work. In my enthusiasm for the scheme, I dubbed it the "Water Pop" -- should have been the "Water Flop." I conducted my water tests in Buda, Texas, (before Don moved there) where some friends lived on a ranch with a stock pond. I think the wings for this plane had a later successful career on a Spatano rouer (sans pylon) -- Victory Harvester or Brutal or some such. I can't tell where this picture was taken. Thanks for the memories, John.
~ Lloyd Bruce
~ Lloyd Bruce
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This photo was almost certainly taken in the 1100 block of Clayton Ln (a.k.a. Boppolia) There's little chance that this particular flight would have ended in a water landing as the fountain in front of the Twin Towers office building did not yet exist.
ReplyDeleteYour glossary doesn't define "ROWing" which could easily be misinterpreted as a spelling variant of "rouing." Like "attorneys general" this term probably should be "RingOW." Even though it would bring even more serious head scratching to the uninitiated, nobody would confuse it for a typo.
ReplyDeleteROW = rise off water. Or in Jungolian that would be ROS -- rise off seap. "Seap," of course, being the Jungolian word for "body of water." I admit that ROW is kind of obscure, but I assumed it's pretty well known among the free-flight modeling crowd, at least by analogy with the better known "ROG" -- rise off ground.
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