Jubilee (oz9127)

About this Plan

Jubilee. Competition free flight model. With profile fuse and vintage styling.

Quote: "The airplane that asks the question: Can a competition free flighter have those endearing looks of an old timer?

Aha! Gotcha, didn't I? You are looking at the photos of the 'Jubilee' and thinking: Boy, that looks sharp! You are looking at those cute fake windows and neat balloon tires and loving them. It looks like a Free-Flight ought to look, and would look if we hadn't got off on all those weird pylon and high thrust trends years ago. You wonder if Dick Mathis really designed the thing because it actually looks decent and it doesn't have swept wingtips, an inverted rudder, or even a high thrust line.

But now the cynic in you asks: Surely it isn't a contest Free-Flight - who does Mathis think he's kidding? That's a reasonable question. One of the reasons so many Free-Flight designs look so funny and alike - have you ever showed your Starduster (oz2098) or Mini-Pearl to a visiting relative and watched the puzzled look on their face? - is we have evolved a basic set of shapes and dimensions that do a good job of winning contests. Competition is so close, we can't spare anything in the name of beauty, realism, or performance. So a strange thing happens. You begin to notice a lot of the
guys showing up at the contests and going over to a corner by themselves to fly 'Old Timers.'

Most died-in-the-wool contest freaks like myself have ignored this trend. I remember Tom Hutchinson's famous newsletter editorial a few years ago when O/T was just starting. In essence, he dismissed O/T as an event where men proved that the same airplanes that wouldn't fly in 1940 still won't fly now! At the time, Tom's wit appealed to me, although it irritated a lot of Old Timer fans on the west coast. But the past year or two has made me wonder if those huge crowds at the O/T events at the Nats and at the U.S. Free Flight Championships (they still fly sepa-rately from the unlimited people) may mean something. What they mean seems to me to be: (1) lots of Free-Flighters like O/T better than modern AMA stuff, (2) even if they don't fly too great, everyone enjoys just looking at them, (3) a lot of them do fly great, (4) many of our top Free-Flighters are there. In other words, O/T has something going for it.

Maybe a Free-Flight that looks some-thing like a real airplane is one of the big attractions. Most O/T's have windows, big squishy wheels, an actual body rather than a stick with hooks and a motor on it, plus a straightforward, attractive internal structure. They are airplanes you can build at a leisurely pace and stand back occasionally to admire. I think most of us enjoy this process as much or more than flying. So my idea, having thought all of this over, was to see if I could make a modern AMA power ship look like an Old Timer and still not embarrass me at the contests. I have succeeded at the former, I think, but I don't know about the latter yet because it's Winter and the Jubilee hasn't been in com-petition. For example, the Jubilee was sitting in the plant yesterday with a num-ber of other models, including some semi-scale ukies and the huge Rambunctious 1040 C ship. Some kids on their way home from school stopped by to exercise their curiosity and guess which model they focused on? The Jubilee, with its funny blown-up tires was an instant celebrity.

As a manufacturer of Free-Flight kits, I am understandably concerned about where this event is headed. It would be very interesting to see what we could come up with if more designers tried to incorporate some of the O/T essence in their latest ships. I doubt that performance would suffer noticably, and I am sure it would relieve some of the boredom that afflicts modern Free-Flight and attract new people to the sport. As an avid enthusiast, I look forward to winning a contest with the Jubilee, especially against pure Free-Flight competition. That would be cute!

Ultimately, the Jubilee will sport a Super Tigre .23 to haul its 16 ounce air-frame (that's right, 20 ounces total and 600 squares - makes you wonder doesn't it). To date it has been tested with a .15 and flies just like any good pylon design. It is more than competitive. A close inspection of the force arrangement will re-veal it is laid out just like most modern pylon designs, except it has a cabin big enough to put fake windows on..."

Jubilee, Flying Models, April 1974.

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Supplementary file notes

Article pages, thanks to RFJ.

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