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History dude

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Does anyone remember the model railway exhibitions at the City Hall?

They had a model of the Midland Station in OO/HO size! I wonder if it has survived?

Now although I have had small train sets and layouts as a youngster as most boys of my generation would have model railways are not really me.

Railways are more Stuarts field of modelling so I am sure he will probably give you a better reply here than I can.

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Air currents, wind direction, thermals etc would be the main cause of this apparent boomerang behaviour

Gliders are very suseptable to this sort of thing and without any R/C control of rudder, ailerons and elevators would be totally at the mercy of an air movement at all.

Annoyingly, if the glider did boomerang back before finally coming down, had the owner known this was happeneing then at some point on the gliders return it would have come back within radio range and full control would then have been restablished and the accident could have been prevented.

ADDITIONAL NOTE FOR HILLDWELLER AND OTHER TECHNICAL MINDED MEMBERS

R/C equipment used to work on the 40 channels in the 11 metre band with frequencies around 27 MHz, in America referred to as the "Citizens Band"

In the early 1980's when the CB radio craze started in Britain it used the same bands and caused no end of interference to R/C equipment, especially the illegal high powered stuff. In fact I am sure that some of those illegal CB radio idiots used to deliberately take their equipment to places where R/C aircraft were being flown to create mayhem and crashes for their own childish amusement.

R/C then moved to bands around 49MHz (the old Band 1, channels 1 to 6 used for BBC 405 line B&W TV), but so did legal, licence free walkie talkie handsets which again was likely to cause interference so I don't know what the current situation is.

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Does anyone remember the model railway exhibitions at the City Hall?

They had a model of the Midland Station in OO/HO size! I wonder if it has survived?

The Sheffield Midland and Bolsover layout if I remember correctly. Midland station was truncated in size lengthways though, I think they had some drawings showing what they'd done. "Danger 12,00 millivolts" always sticks in my mind.

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The Sheffield Midland and Bolsover layout if I remember correctly.

Oh yes! Bolsover was a single track line to a small terminus station!

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Well, with modern multichannel R/C equipment it would be possible to do that.

A R/C relay servo which operates a spring loaded / clockwork mechanism when activated that pushes off the canopy and throws the model pilot out on his seat, with a carefully attached parachute to bring him down safely. Should be quite simple to arrange as you would only want to operate an ejector seat once per flight, and not several times like the other controls.

Never seen it done, never seens plans for doing it, never heard any enthusiasts mention it or talk about so you may be onto a new thing for R/C model aircraft there History Dude. ;-)

Talking of ejection seats, the US F104 was widely known as 'the widowmaker' because of its poor record. And at a time when ejction seats were introduced for many fighter aircraft that were capable of being used on the ground, the F104 was an exception. The high tail unit made it unsafe to eject in the usual way, so the seat fired downwards, which required the plane to be rolled to the inverted position before ejecting.

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the seat fired downwards, which required the plane to be rolled to the inverted position before ejecting.

Edwards Air Force Base in western USA, where test pilots and astronauts worked in the late 50's and 60's and latterly used as a landing site for the returning space shuttles is named after a test pilot (called Edwards) who was killed there performing this very manoever at low altitude on landing approach. Unfortunately the plane did not roll quickly enough and the seat fired him out downward into the ground.

This incident about how the base got its name is vividly described in the book "The Right Stuff" about America's first (Project Mercury) astronauts, although I don't remember it being in the film version.

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