THE HISTORY OF V.A.R.M.S The Annual Diary 1990 - 2009

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In short, they took less skill and forethought to fly, and made a lot of us mediocre pilots look pretty
good. Soon they began to win all of the contests, and realistic sailplane models faded into the
background.
Which is too bad, because a lot of satisfaction of modelling comes not from the flying itself
but from the daydreaming that takes place at the design table and the building board. Some of the
most satisfying soaring flights I've ever had were flights of fancy, dreaming of how 'this one' is
going to look up there in its first thermal, or floating across base leg and turning final. And nothing,
repeat nothing, flies as realistically in the imagination as a scale model.
Please don't think I'm arguing for a return to "realism" in soaring. Nobody loves a
polyhedral floater like I do ... I even fly 'em on the slope! Light polyhedral sailplanes make no
pretence of imitating the flight of full-scale ships; they imitate instead the hawks and vultures and
falcons who ride "the rolling level underneath him steady air" that Hopkins describes in his poem
"The Windhover".
All the same, I never drive past a glider port without picking up just a bit of a charge from
all those big birds sitting patiently beside the runway, one wingtip on the ground, as if they were
thinking of pole vaulting themselves into the sky. And when all those little charges build up, as
they do every two or three years, I find myself dragging out my ragged collection of factory threeviews
and line drawings and poring over them, dreaming. That means it's time to build another
scale ship, just for a change of pace.
Maybe I should explain what I mean by "scale". I have neither the talent nor the patience to
build scale the way Colonel Bob Thacker builds scale. Or Doc Hall. Or Gordon Pearson. These
people take a full-size sailplane and reproduce it in miniature, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, hour by
gruelling hour. When one of these flying museums goes up the line, everyone holds their breath,
including the pilot. That's too much tension for me ... a constant, nagging low-grade fear every
second you're in the air. Just like flying a borrowed model on 27 Mhz.
On the other hand, there's no thrill left in dragging out the old Cirrus. Sure, it looks a lot
like the real thing up there in the sky; two crossed toothpicks at 1500 feet. But that dime store
plastic fuselage! And that canopy full of servos and pushrods, where a pilot (or at least an empty
seat and a joystick) oughta be!
"Scale" to me, means something between these two extremes. Maybe the term "Semi-scale"
or "Sunday scale," would be better. It has to be realistic-looking, both in the air and on the ground.
But it can't have so many hours in it that I'm afraid to take it flying every weekend. And it shouldn't
copy the real thing so lavishly that it flies like a plaster saint. It has to have a few design
compromises that will make it a worthwhile performer.
Take the Schweizer 1-26, for example. It's still America's most popular sailplane ... you'll
find one to model at almost every gliderport in the country. Pictures, three-views, instrument
layouts are all easy to come by. In the past, I've modelled the '26 in 60, 90 and 100 inch spans.
Right now I have one on the boards with a full ten feet of wing. But the 1-26 has some problems.
On the 120inch version, the fuselage scales out to around 62 inches overall, and that's fine. But the
maximum fuselage height, just behind the wing leading edge, comes out at more than 10 inches, not
including wheel and skid! If you build the 1-26 to exact scale, it's going to look awfully fat around
the middle. And it's going to be a drogue dog in the sky. What I do is slim it down about two
inches in vertical height and one inch in max width while I'm drawing up the plans. Not only will
the resulting model fly better, it will actually look more realistic than a true-scale model.
Perspective plays funny tricks on the human eye when objects are scaled up and down in size ... ask
any sculptor.
A second problem on the 1-26 is its airfoil. Nobody in their right mind would hang an
airfoil like that on a model; it looks like a badly deflated balloon, a piece of restroom graffiti, a
second-hand bubblegum cigar. How it produces lift, even in full scale, if one of the sweet mysteries
of life my granny used to sing about. I've always suspected that the 1-26 is what makes the ship a
perfect one-design competition sailplane; pilots tell me that nothing the factory or the individual
owner can do seems to change the plane's performance much, so a 1-26 contest becomes truly a