Upset (oz9526)

About this Plan

Upset. Radio control aerobatic model.

Quote: "From a basic design concept in 1953, Great Britain's Chris Olsen developed the 'Upset' rated one of the finest entries at the 1967 World Championships...

Upset is a design which I made in 1965 in order to compete in the World Championships in Sweden. It was developed from a number of previous models which date back to my first radio controlled model which was built in 1953. The basic design of this model, which had a box fuselage, parallel chord wing, and stabilizer and due to the fact that low wing models had not then been invented, it had the wing mounted on the top of the box. This model was enlarged, reduced and altered in many ways until in 1957 it resulted in a model called Uproar (oz2220). As far as I was personally concerned this model was a success and was flown in many versions, nearly thirty in all, until 1964. The differences were all in detail, wing sections, rigging angles, etc. The early versions had 18% thick wings but the fallacy of this idea soon became apparent.

By the beginning of 1964 it had penetrated even my stubborn mind that the basic ugliness of the airframe was detracting from the better than average flying performance. Since the performance had been arrived at largely by accident, and recognizing that I was on to a good thing, I was rather loathe to give it up as there appeared to be some difficulty in finding a replacement. During the period that I had been flying Uproar in competitions, 1958 to 1963, as a result of seeing a German model with a low wing nearly win the King of the Belgars cup in 1958, I had become interested in low wing models and had attempted to make a low wing version of Uproar assuming that if the performance was similar and it looked better it would be a much better competition model.

Unfortunately this model did not turn out to be quite as good as Uproar and although it was developed through ten models it never proved better. However in 1964 it was decided to use the low wing model called Uplift (oz6027) in spite of its performance being no better, on the assumption that it looked a lot better than Uproar and competition judges being notoriously short sighted tend to be influenced in their judgment by what they see when the model is within focus, ie. on the ground.

The main problem with Uplift was a definite reluctance to spin and since some fool had explained to the British judges the difference between a spin and a spiral dive this was losing points in competition, also there was the competition in Sweden to consider, the judging is always pretty tough in these events. So with this in mind and a great deal more confidence than I should have had considering past experience, it was decided to design a completely new model..."

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