The Central New York (CNY) Indoor Flying Society is dedicated to indoor electric and rubber powered flight. They meet to fly several times a week in the gym of a Catholic Church in Cicero, NY, which is one town over from where I live. Tonight, I finally made it over to check them out.
A few of the club pilots were there and all were flying small, R/C electric aircraft. They had a good mix of ultra light, fixed wing, and quad copter aircraft to fly. Besides their small size, what is most noticeable about these aircraft is how light weight and quiet they are. Most of them weighed less than 2 ounces including all their radio gear and engines. In fact, they were so light weight that they were impacted by the air currents from the heating duct fans in the gym.
I was offered the opportunity to fly one of the ultra lights. After a few circuits of the gym, which included a couple physical encounters with the concrete block walls of the gym, I proceeded to ‘land’ the plane on top of one of the overhead fluorescent lighting fixtures! Luckily, they were equipped to handle such ‘landings’ and a prod with a very long pole ‘encouraged’ the plane back into the air where it promptly sought a (hard) landing on the gym floor. Thus was demonstrated another one of the features of these aircraft…they are virtually indestructible! With a tweak of a mis-aligned vertical fin due to the hard landing, the ultra light was back in the air again flying just as if nothing had happened.
I was disappointed to learn that there are not many active model builders in this club. Apparently, there are a couple guys who dabble in free flight balsa and tissue rubber band powered planes but none were present tonight. I had brought 3 of my kits with me to show and some interest in them was shown. But I think that I may be mostly a lone wolf with regards to my active modeling interests as compared to the main interests of the members of this club. Nonetheless, they would welcome me to fly my models with them and it is good to know that I have such an indoor flying venue so close to where I live.
Now I just need to build a couple planes to fly!
(Click on any photo to get a large image with higher resolution)
A few of the CNY flyers
One of the ultra light’s in flight
Flying a (small!) quad copter
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