The hobby called Free Flight model airplane design, building and flying seems to have gone too far toward competition. Most of the airplanes  are made out of balsa wood and covered with tissue. They can take fifty hours to make and can be very fragile "toys". The Free Flight title is due to the fact that the rubber powered flights are unassisted. The airplane is on it's own once launched either off of the ground or hand launched. There are usually no moving control surfaces. What control surfaces there may be are not adjusted from the pilot after launch.  The plane must survive the initial power burst, the climb, the cruise, the glide and then the landing. It's no wonder why the Free Flight model airplane hobby is challenging and exciting. 

     There is a lot that goes into these model airplanes.  The physics involved with each different design must be taken into account. I've designed airplanes which fly well but don't fit into any competition class. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

     The problem is competition. There are several organized Free Flight competitions each year which include several different classes of model airplanes. It's a little like having Indy race cars, stock cars, dragsters and midgits all at the same place but not competing outside their class. When I am designing and then building a plane to compete with, the competition aspect almost always takes the fun out of the process. There are so many rules. For example the plane has to weigh so much. The propellor has to be so big. The rubber motor can't be any larger than a given size. The wing area has to be so much. I understand that the rules are there to level the playing field but you would think that in each class the idea would be to make a plane to fly the longest, and that is the case but it seems that all the planes in each competition class are more alike than they are different.

     I've built planes from kits and origional designs from scratch. There are kits available which have been designed to fit into a given specific competition class. And there are a lot of those. Where is the fun in doing that? How about letting innovation have it's place.