by
Doug Crumley
I started building flying models as a teenager in the late 1950s. Even then Scale aircraft was my only real interest and CL was my only option for flying them. I was dormant in the hobby for roughly three decades in my young-adult years because of career and family priorities. By the late 1980s my kids had become adults and I had the time and means to rekindle the hobby. By that time RC had become reliable and affordable.
I flew in my first U.S. Scale Masters Championships in 1991 and have qualified for and attended that event every year since. My competition aircraft have been high-wing tail-draggers, and approximately half of them have been warbirds (such as the L-19 and L-5).
In 2001 I built my first Fieseler Storch. It was Dennis Bryant’s 94-inch design, with plans and parts from Bob Holman. The plans are some of the best I have seen, and it was a challenging project. While building the Storch I learned a lot about the subject and what a unique and outstanding airplane it was for its time. It has become one of my favorite aircraft.
What’s to like about the Storch? Its sleek, flowing, aerodynamic lines? Hardly. The aircraft looks as if it were designed by a committee of architects and structural engineers that had never heard the term “parasite drag.”
However, the Storch has a distinctive look and always gets attention at the flying field. Its “unclean” appearance lends itself to an incredible amount of small surface-detail work, if you are so inclined.
In spite of its looks, the Storch was probably the best aircraft ever designed to accomplish its intended function, which was to take off and land in the smallest space and on the roughest surface possible. Even today, if you want an aircraft that will get in and out of tighter spaces than the Storch, you use a helicopter.
