Coming Events

Fall California Valley XC Soaring Race

Radio Control Cross Country Soaring News

2010 Montague Cross Country Cup

This year the Montague XC contest tested a new scoring system.  This system is exactly the same as used in fullsize soaring contests and has the potential to improve the accuracy of the contest scoring. Up to 12 teams flew three speed tasks, and results show that the course is getting flown faster and faster.

RCGroups has a thread of the event with comments and photos.

Congratulations!

Roll Your Own

Greg Norsworthy has detailed construction of a competitive cross-country racing glider in his RCGroups thread. Greg has considerable experience in building and flying cross-country gliders. In this thread, he describes building his eighth plane.

The glider’s most immediate and striking feature is its simplicity: it is a polyhedral design controlled by rudder and elevator only! No ailerons, no flaps, no spoilers. The model is the result of a thorough thought process about just what is needed to compete successfully in a cross-country contest. Do not be fooled by this simplicity: one of Greg’s gliders holds the current course speed record in Montague!

Greg’s write-up is a great resource for all who want to build their own cross-country glider. But even those who prefer to buy an ARF will benefit from studying this thread. Greg meticulously exposes and explains not just building and design details, but also how to set-up a glider to assure it flies hands-off. This is very important at altitude, when all the pilot sees from the ground is a speck.

ALOFT Unofficially beats FAI Goal-and-Return World Record!

On October 5th, 2008, the ALOFT autonomous soaring glider completed a goal-and-return flight of 30.2mi (60.4mi round trip), which is farther than the world-record of 24.3mi set in 2005 by Gary Fogel. Also, we achieved a personal best-duration record of 4.5hr air-time, 98% of which was controlled by autopilot.
During the flight, ALOFT traveled 114.14km (70.9mi) miles, simultaneously qualifying the team for a 100km distance pin from xcsoaring.com.

World Record in Cross Country Soaring

Twenty years ago, Joe Wurts set the cross-country RC-soaring record, which still stands today. He wrote a report about it way back then, it is still relevant today, and we are happy to post it in the hopes of inspiring others to make their own record attempts.

Testing RNR’s SBXC Performance

Dan Edwards has updated his testing paper Performance Testing of RNR’s SBXC Using a Piccolo Autopilot on March 2008. The paper discusses actual flight performance of the popular SBXC cross-country glider.
Dan is a graduate student at North Carolina State University and has a website about his autonomous soaring research.

SBXC Assembly Manual

The venerable SBXC and Super-XC are popular gliders for cross-country soaring.

This downloadable PDF document describes the step-by-step assembly with many photos and detailed descriptions.

Minimizing Slop in Control Surfaces

The popular cross-country gliders SBXC and MXC are molded performance planes. Slop is a problem, especially in high-performance gliders.
At best, slop makes flying more difficult; and at worst, it can lead to flutter which in turn may cause air frame failure.

SBXC and MXC Sailplanes

The SBXC and MXC are commercially available all-molded gliders designed specifically for cross-country competition. Their design yields high performance while also providing the stability needed to pilot them from a moving car.

Testing RNR’s SBXC Performance

John Ellias and Dan Edwards have tested actual flight performance of the popular SBXC cross-country glider. John used an on-board GPS unit to arrive at a sink polar for the glider. Dan expanded on John's data using an auto pilot.

Organize a Contest

How to design and run a cross-country soaring event. Course, tasks, base and rules are aspects to consider.