SEN 3418
- About Time at Lost Hills
- The Great F1B Experiment
About Time at Lost Hills
The Flying Neurons have made some additions to their Abouttime feature and have been working with the NorthAmerican Cup team. This link https://abouttime.flyingneurons.io/event takes you to Abouttime and you select this years North American events. They are at the bottom of list of events. The new features include facilities to manually record times of people not using the Neuron devices and for the contest director to manage his event. More reporting later.
The Great F1B Experiment
Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Time: 9.00 am
Location: Lost Hills
CD: Walt Ghio [email protected]
Entry fee: $5
Editorial Comment
The Great Experiment is not part of the regular Fab Feb program. It this one of many ideas of ways to reduce F1 World Champs level performance. If you think this idea warrants being tested you can take part in the program and see how it works out. Your participation, including parment is separate from the Fab Feb program and should be done directly with Walt.
End of editorial comment.
Prizes: 50% of the entry for 1st, 30% of the entry for 2nd and 20% of the entry for 3rd
The idea for this contest is to test the new F1B idea put forward by Mike Woodhouse to change the format of how we run an F1B contest. We have read many comments on SEN and Facebook about how to reduce the performance of our F1B models. Hopefully this contest will give us some data to show if Mike’s idea is a good way forward.
No thermal equipment will be allowed. This means no heat/ wind/ pressure sensors, no poles with streamers, no bubble machines, no cat tails or any other item to figure out when a thermal is present. Only you and your model will be allowed to make a flight. Yes, piggybacking is allowed. If you are caught using any item to detect a thermal you will be disqualified from the Great Experiment.
You will have a window of ten minutes to wind your motor and make your flight for the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th rounds. For the 2nd, 4th and 6th round you will be allowed the 60-minute round time to fly your flight. You can declare the window and if you do not fly, it will be an attempt. Two attempts allowed. If you break a motor in the motor tube you will have to replace it within the time window. Your timer will record the start of the window on the time card.
As most contest these days allow the flyers to time each other, I will use this format for this contest. Please select another flyer to make a flyer/ timer team. Also, I would like to have each of you rotate your flying order each round. One fly first in the first round and the other fly first in the second round. This will even out the piggybacking as the first group will have more models in the air to observe if in lift or not in lift. Please do not wait till the morning of the contest to ask another flyer to join you in the experiment.
We will fly from a flight line with pole position. After winding your motor and you are ready to fly you will pick a pole position that does not have a flyer on it. Mark this pole position on the time card for this round. You cannot use this pole again. No reserving a pole position.
No winding equipment is allowed on the flight line. Please keep a gap of five meters between the flight line and the winding equipment. You may set up on each side of the flight line. This will all the flyer to see the poles for selection. Please, no motorcycles on the flight line. I will provide several poles with a half meter streamer that will be positioned on the flight line for wind direction.
After the contest I would like the contestant to write a review and post it on SEN: [email protected]. This way the other F1B flyers in the World can see your review to see how this Great Experiment worked out or did not work out.
Round 1- 9.00 to 10.00 180 sec 10-minute period
Round 2- 10:00 to 11:00 180 sec 60-minute round time to fly
Round 3- 11.00 to 12.00 180 sec 10-minute period
Round 4- 12:00 to 1:00 180 sec 60-minute round time to fly
Round 5- 1:00 to 2:00 180 sec 10-minute period
Round 6- 2.00 to 3.00 180 sec 60-minute round time to fly
Round 7- 3:00 to 4:00 180 sec 10-minute period
Flyoff 1: 4:30 to 4:37 360 sec
Flyoff 2: 5:15 to 5:22 480 sec
Flyoff 3: 6:00 to 6:07 600 sec
SEN Status
Our new web site is online with archives of SEN going back to 1997 plus many items about FAI Free Flight. It can be found at http://www.faifreeflight.org
Existing SEN subscribers can update their preferences by following the update your preferences link at the bottom of this page.
New users can sign up at this link http://eepurl.com/crOnvj
or at the SEN website