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Fellow District of Columbia Radio Control club (DCRC) members were roused by my preachings at the September 1962 meeting. We laid plans for an assault on the Velitchkovsky altitude record of 7,100 feet. July 4-5, 1963, the Naval Surface Weapons Lab at Dahlgren, Virginia, provided a radar and two operators to measure the altitude and two pairs of ships’ 40-power binoculars mounted on an old gun mount. In one of the accompanying photos you can see me sitting in the mount staring nearly straight up at a model I called “Skyrocket.”

Walt Good and Howard McEntee broke Velitchkovsky’s record. (Howard was an early-RC icon who wrote a column and articles about the subject which educated many in the 1940s and 1950s.) My model went higher, and a photo shows that my first world record of 13,320 feet almost doubled Velitchkovsky’s.

This was fun! I went on a crusade to break more of the Soviet hero’s records, and by 1968 I held major RC records in duration, speed, distance in a straight line, and distance in a closed circuit. Seaplane and glider altitude marks had also been logged. Velichkovsky was down to zero listings.

I kept judging at world Aerobatics championships through the 1960s and finally stopped after Gorizia, Italy, in 1973. In training sessions for judges, I steadily emphasized that they should be objective and write scores strictly on the basis of what the airplane does—not who is flying it or how it looks.

Yet when I analyzed score sheets each time for reporting to the FAI Committee, it was obvious that some judges boosted scores of competitors from their own countries and cut others because of national dislikes. Some judges were impressed by competitors who wore neckties or white pants, and others marked down because they didn’t like airplanes that were painted green. The tightness of the female mechanics’ shorts also brought on occasional errors in judgment. Some of the competitors were angry that the judges weren’t fair, etc.

There are no gray areas; either you did it or you failed.

Herein lies my love for busting records, where you are competing with Mother Nature and the precise rules of gravity and physics. Performance is measured with stopwatches and tape measures. There are no gray areas; either you did it or you failed.

Even though I had left Velitchkovsky in the dust, I continued chasing records because it was fun and educational. By 1991 I had 18 records under my belt. With Old Faithful III and Marvelous Martha (shown), this number was escalated to 23 by 1999. These two models played a significant role in inspiring my dream of flying across the Atlantic Ocean.

Old Faithful flew for 33 hours and 39 minutes October 3-5, 1992. I was the sole pilot because the FAI had a “Hail, Lindbergh!” rule stating that only one pilot was allowed. We beat this rule with technology. Paul Howey made a direction-finding receiver that we put in the wing, then we placed an amateur radio beacon on the ground slightly upwind of me.

The airplane automatically steered toward the beacon, made a loop downwind when it passed the beacon, then repeated this pattern for most of the flight. I was half asleep on a chaise lounge most of the time.

After this success I started joking about building an 11-pound airplane that would fly for 60 hours. I would find someone with a huge 30-knot cruiser yacht (or maybe a Navy destroyer) and gather the big crowd of friends formed setting all of these records, and we would have a big party on the fantail of this ship while the model chased a beacon that was on the mast! What a blast! It was fun to talk about it even though I knew it wouldn’t work in a moderate wind.

Marvelous Martha conjured visions of a different approach. First, we chased it down routes 81 and 95 at airspeeds up to approximately 70 mph, as measured with a Global Positioning System (GPS) in the chase convertible. Second, I built a dynamometer.

Using horsepower numbers I calculated what aerodynamicists call CDnaught, Cdo; that is, the drag coefficient caused by the profile and skin friction, exclusive of drag caused by lift. Martha had a Cdo of 0.019, which is smaller than the famous super-clean WW II P-51 Mustang’s 0.021. The other significant number came from Martha’s last record of 808 miles in closed course, piloted by my son Scott on June 26, 1998.

I was angry with the FAI for refusing to list me as a part of a team for the two earlier Martha records. Rob Rosenthal was named record holder for the distance flight. He’s a nice guy. I like him! But all he did was pilot the airplane part-time for roughly nine hours. I had worked for two years to develop the model! I certainly would have flown it if I weren’t nearly blind!

The technical challenge of perfecting a model is difficult, but flying is easy if you know how. So to outwit the ancient mariners of the CIAM (International Aeromodeling Committee), my son Scott, whose first name is Maynard, flew the closed-course distance attempt. I take great delight in looking at the record book and seeing that Maynard S. Hill holds that difficult record. (See “Racing Against Sunset” in the October 1999 Model Aviation on page 58.)

Martha was flying approximately 70 mph for 13 hours and had two hours of fuel left at the end of the day. There is a law of physics of airplanes that the power required increases at the cube of the speed. In the simpleminded way I like to work, this rule says that if we slowed the model to half of 70 mph, or 35, it should be able to fly eight times as long. That’s 15 x 8 = 120 hours at 35 mph, or a distance of 4,200 miles. That’s more than New York to Paris!

But hold it! Some drag caused by lift crawls into this picture because of the slower speed. There are equations in textbooks that tell how to estimate this penalty; when I did the arithmetic, the projections still indicated a distance of approximately 3,700 miles.

From this point I applied my rules of experience. Textbooks assume perfect airfoils and perfect flow, high propeller efficiency, etc. In the real world of small models and low Reynolds numbers in bumpy air, you’ll do well to get half of that textbook number.

So in the end I still saw 1,875 miles as a possibility. This estimated figure is close to the distance from Newfoundland to Ireland. Besides, if things did not meet this target, there is often a nice tailwind blowing across the north Atlantic.

Similar numbers had come from Martha’s 775-mile record in 1995. So in the spring of 1996 I started thinking seriously about a transatlantic aeromodel. It would have to meet all of the requirements for a true model airplane or I wouldn’t try. It would have to weigh less than 11 pounds and use a 10-cc-maximum engine.

Rob Rosenthal showed me how we could measure a model’s track and speed with an onboard handheld GPS receiver. The concept would be to launch under normal radio control then switch to autonomous flight. A miniature onboard GPS receiver would provide position data to steer a programmed route. Landing in Ireland within 500 meters of the predesignated spot would be accomplished under manual RC control by a pilot. Newfoundland to Ireland isn’t New York to Paris, but it is across the Atlantic! So that was it.

I chuckle now about the fact that at that time my knowledge of Canadian geography was blurry, to say the least. Labrador, Newfoundland, Gander, and Goose Bay were cold places somewhere near the Arctic Circle from which thousands of American-built bombers and fighters were ferried to England during WW II. I didn’t even know that Newfoundland was an island accessible only by ferry or airplane.

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