NMPRA

I know this is a racing forum, but many of you know that I am highly involved with the US Junior Team for Indoor Free Flight, through my activities with Science Olympiad. This has been a highly successful program in bringing youth into Free Flight, both indoors and outdoors, and getting kids to pursue careers in aviation and engineering. Free Flight gives a cost-effective path to model aviation, and can be a stepping stone to all aspects, even pylon racing.

I am once again the Manager of the US Junior F1D Team. We are departing Monday for Romania. We have a VERY strong team, both Juniors and Seniors. Two of the three Juniors competed in the last cycle, and the third is a very accomplished young man from Southern Cal. All four members of the Senior team are past World Champions, and we also have the current WC.

If you are interested in following our progress, we will have daily updates starting Wednesday or Thursday this week at https://thef1dblog.wordpress.com/2024/

If you are not interested, well, I'll see you at Whittier in a month!

Chuck Andraka
11H

Chuck,

Good luck to all the Team members!!

Have a great competition and time in Romania.

Safe travels

Trey

Duplicate

Good luck

Best of luck to the team. Thanks Chuck for all of your work with the indoor free flight youths.
Jim

Best of luck to you, Chuck and the competitors. I admire your generousity, dedication and expertise in this interesting segment of modeling - it's extraordinarily technical, no doubt!

Safe travels, and I'll be certain to look in on the link you provided.

Tim Lampe

Best of Luck to all! Safe travels.

DK

Chuck, this is a great thing you are doing!

Best of luck to the team and you!

Gordon McWilliams

Keep us posted on how Team USA is doing!

We have completed all the pre contest and practice days. The salt mine is hell on planes and people. The three juniors have had some setbacks with broken parts, but all have repaired and are ready for tomorrow.

The air in the mine had been pretty bad during testing, mostly due to the number of tourists in the mine. This should not be a problem during the event. But it has made calibration and optimization difficult. The planes are struggling to climb, which impacts duration strongly.

The senior team looks very strong, as does WC Brett Sanborn. I hope our juniors can keep up!

Should be exciting. Unfortunately, the WiFi in the mine is not working this year, do there will not be a live stream. But there will continue daily updates on the f1d blog page.

Chuck
11H

It's over. What am exhausting week!

The senior Team USA took the of the top for spots, including a new world record of 29:41 for the new World Champ Yaun Kang Lee.

On the junior team, Daniel Guo of Sierra Vista California is the new world champion, and set a new US record for youth senior at 26:38. The rest of the junior team overcame a lot of issues and put in enough good times today to move past Ukraine into second place.

Chuck
11H

Congratulations to Team USA!

Great job with the team Chuck.

Congrats to all involved.

Laird

Congrats to the team and to you, Chuck, for all you do to help out the youngsters!

Glad you got to meet my friend in Romania, too - he's a great guy, and I always looked forward to his visits to our factory. I just never got the chance to travel to Romania to work with him there, unfortunately.