Interest in Carmichaels Fly-In soars
CARMICHAELS – The skies over the borough will be filled with considerable buzz over this Father’s Day weekend: the buzz of model aircraft engines. Beginning Thursday, control-line airplane fans will descend on the home of John Brodak as he hosts the seventh annual Fly-In. The four-day event brings together control-line flying enthusiasts, beginners, spectators and tie-weary dads.
“It’s a great way to spend Father’s Day,” said Brodak. “Even though these are competitions, it’s more like a family gathering. When people lose, they don’t get angry. It’s a fun thing.”
This year’s Fly-In is expected to be the largest yet, with more than 200 participants from nearly all 50 states and several foreign countries, including for the first time a participant from Japan, bringing their enthusiasm to Brodak’s 23-acre home in Carmichaels.
The competitions are split into beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert categories. The largest skill group is the beginner category, which had more than 70 members last year.
“The beginner turnout is really pleasing, because it means so many people are becoming interested and trying it out,” Brodak said.
While the Fly-In has plenty of opportunities for beginners, for serious control-line pilots, the annual event is an opportunity that cannot be missed.
“It’s less than a month from the nationals (competition held in Indiana), so this is a warm-up and a chance to test out their new planes they built over the winter,” Brodak said. “These planes, you don’t just build and fly. There’s a lot of fine tuning.”
Those involved in the national competition will fly more than 100 test flights on an airplane before the event in January, Brodak estimates.
With the large expected turnout of more than 200 participants, dozens of support staff and judges and upwards of 1,000 spectators, the Fly-In once again should bring an abundance of business to the area. Brodak estimates that Greene and Fayette counties will benefit from $60,000 to $70,000 worth of business from the weekend.
“An event like this has more benefit than a horse show or carnival, where people come and go. These people come here and stay for multiple days,” he said. “Also, I think it’s a great thing for our community, because it brings people into our area and allows them to see how beautiful it is.”
The Fly-In takes off Thursday with profile precision aerobatics flights and old-time stunts, featuring control-line planes from before 1952.
The event continues with a busy day Friday. The lineup includes classic stunts with planes from before 1968, profile carrier, sportsman carrier, carrier one and two combined and fun skill flights, as well as appearance judging and “Junkyard Wars.”
The carrier competitions involve maneuvers in the air, followed by landings onto a scale mockup of an aircraft carrier.
A new and popular feature from last year’s Fly-In was the Junkyard Wars competition, which returns with nearly double the number of teams participating. The teams are given a wooden crate and then attempt to build, in the hour time limit, a control-line airplane with an engine, tank and control apparatus they provide.
Saturday will feature precision aerobatics, Foxberg racing, clown racing and speed limit combat. According to Brodak, speed limit combat is one of the more popular activities and features two pilots squaring off in a dogfight to cut a ribbon off the back of their competitor’s aircraft.
The event concludes on Sunday with more precision aerobatics, sports skill and profile skill flights.
According to Brodak, interest in control-line flying is thriving after suffering for years because many of the big companies ignored control-line aircraft to focus on radio-controlled planes since around 1992.
This lack of production left many control-line pilots in unfriendly – and empty – skies.
Control-line aviation, popular for years before the invention of radio-controlled craft, differs from its radio-controlled counterpart because with control line, the pilot is tethered to the airplane. Stunted by the lack of available parts and planes, control-line flying was feared to be “as good as dead,” said Brodak. Control-line aviation pulled out of its nosedive as small manufacturers, like Fly-In host Brodak Manufacturing, began producing control-line kits to fill the void left by the big companies.
As availability grew, so did interest in control-line aircraft and the Fly-In.
“[The Fly-in] started as only two days; now it’s up to four days, and we’re starting to have trouble fitting it all in. We’ll extend the event if that’s what the interest warrants,” he said. “I’ll go two weeks if I have to.”
For more information about the Fly-In, call 724-966-2726.