Both, the Grumman and the Aero 145 are jewels. A bit small in my opinion, but jewelry.

Adrian, thank you for providing all of the pictures from the event.  I was hoping to keep people updated but for a variety of reasons just wasn't able to.  Also, that Grumman is mine.  I've never had it called jewelry before but I appreciate the compliment .  And it is too small...

Currently the competition is finished and we are back in Bucharest waiting for our flights home tomorrow.  For the first time in the last 10 days I have both time and an internet connection so here's a quick(ish) report.  I have some airplane pictures to post but that'll take some time to prepare for posting.

This was my first Worlds so I don't have anything to compare it to. It was bigger that I expected, there were something like 80 planes registered in the 3 classes. The quality of the planes was definitely what I was expecting, truly outstand craftsmanship everywhere you looked.

The airline booking agent told us the boxes could go as sporting equipment, turns out that was untrue. We had to scramble 2 weeks out to build boxes to send via Fedex. They went via a "space available" international rate that was about 15% of the priority rate. We would not have been able to send them using the normal rate. They did all arrive in time though.  You can guess which is mine

In time, but not intact. Several of the boxes had holes in the sides, one had the top crushed in, and mine had the center skid ripped off and a hole in the bottom. Also my plane and equipment showed signs of being dropped from a decent height. All of the spray equipment under the plane got broken off or shoved through the belly, with the broken off pieces getting lost through the new hole. Somehow the tailwheel packed in a padded box got broken. There was a lot of clearance between the plane and some equipment but the drop shoved the tail wires into it and bent or broke them.

I didn't bring a torch and brazing supplies but I was able to straighten the bent one and replaced the broken one with some safety wire from the aeroclub. Someone else had some JB Quick and I got the tailwheel repaired. I also used safety wire to roughly simulate the lost spray stuff and got the plane flying.

Our little area

This year the US F4H team was-

Mike Barbee with his 1/4 scale Hawker Fury from Jerry Bates. It's electric using the same drive system his big King Air has.

Jack Buckley with his scratch built 1/4 scale Fairchild 24. He also has a 1/3rd scale in this same scheme that now lives in a museum. This was Jack's 4th Worlds.

Me with the scratch built 1/6th Ag Cat.

In F4C we had Tim Dickey with his scratch built 1/4 scale Waco UEC, I think it has a UMS 7 cylinder radial.

I know this is RCSB but we also had an F4B C/L team. I believe this was the first year in a while that F4B was held at the Worlds.

Our team was Peter Bauer with his scratch built electric Islander, Mike McHenry with his L4, and Allen Goff with his Nieuport 21.

Static judging, that's Graham Kennedy of the UK and Stan Alexander of the US.

And my static scores, good enough for 3rd place static

The hangar was a little ways from the flight line so we had some interesting transportation

The driver was usually Daniel Petcu, a local and member of the Romanian national FAI free flight team. He was a very interesting character with an interesting story. I never rode in the sidecar but here's Tim in it

And the rest of us, heading out for a practice flight with Mike's Fury

The site was the Strejnic Aerodrome, a VERY busy training airport. There is a 750mx30m paved runway and a longer grass runway, as has already been posted.  It was advertised as allowing landing on both grass and asphalt but the grass was very long and clumpy and the ground was riddled with gopher holes, really just your typical airport grass.  Definitely not a suitable surface for models. Still, a few (more or less) successfully landed on the grass. 

 I had never operated the Ag Cat off of a paved surface and it was predictably unhappy about it. During practice I tried my normal wheel landing technique and all it would do is bounce. I ended up switching to a 3 point, full stall landing and that did better. As Richard mentioned there are edge lights lining the runway and at least 1 airplane hit one, along with another that hit (and broke off) a taxiway sign. Here's a shot of the runway, there's an edge light right where we're standing. You can also see the grass

In F4 you fly one at a time so it takes some time to get through a round. To compound that the airport was doing training until 1200 most every day so we only got the afternoons to fly. The Spanish team made the best of it with jamon, chorizo, and wine, which they very generously shared .

The team from Finland was the only one with only one person, RCSB's own Jylhami, Mika Jylha. I've followed Mika's builds for a while and was looking forward to meeting him. Since he was alone he asked me to call for him, since he actually knows the FAI maneuvers I asked him to call for me.  We became friends rather quickly (even though he refers to my plane as Peanut Scale ) and the US team adopted him for the week.  As he's already posted he had a mishap early on but he got the plane repaired, he did such a good job that you'd never know it was broken.  We even made it to the CIAM Facebook page

He even made it to our team photo.  From left to right- Jack Buckley, Peter and Cathy Bauer, Tim Dickey, Steve Eagle (manager), Ben Andrus (me), Mike McHenry, Mike Barbee, Alan Goff, Mika Jylha.

And what we all came for, some scores.  

F4C

F4H.  #4 was disqualified after this was posted.  

And F4B.  Peter Bauer absolutely dominated.  I've only known him for a year but I've heard a lot about his dad.  I'm sure he would love to see this.  RCSB's own Septic, Danny Fenton, also did quite good.  If you consider that one of Peter's maneuvers is Multi engine it make's Danny's scoring more impressive.

So, in the end, the US had a 1st place in F4B and a 1st place Team in F4B, Tim Dickey made it to the top 10 in F4C, and we made the 4th place team in F4H.  I think we gave a good account of ourselves and still had flyable airplanes at the end.

We also had a really great time.   I'm not particularly sociable and don't often enjoy meeting new people.  However, meeting all of the amazing modelers from around the world was one of the best parts.  We obviously had a lot of interaction with the British and Aussie teams but also the Greek team (my Ag Cat is Greek).  I'm not sure we encountered anyone who was unpleasant or unfriendly, everyone seemed to be having a good time despite the hiccups.  It was also great to meet people who I'd known on RCSB for years, like Mika and Danny.  I was hoping to get an RCSB member picture but it never worked out.  And you were missed Richard, we'll try it again next time.

I did manage to grab a shot of Danny and my planes together, since they were both 1/6th scale. 

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a picture with the other really small plane, Mat Dawson's Blackburn Firecrest from the UK.  I think we've started a Small Model Club at the Worlds, there's talk of making a patch.

So that's it, a great time and hopefully I'll be in England in 2026 competing in F4C.  I'll edit airplane pictures on the plane ride and post some eye candy tomorrow.

Ben

Thanks Ben, Your build thread and build up to Romania was the best.

It's not easy travailing round the world with models is it!

  Rely nice it see USA back in it.

The UK team had a particularly bad time, I'l let them tell that 'tail'  when they have time.

We look forward to welcoming everybody to UK in 2026

Funny you should mention that.  Operation Tidal Wave was 81 years ago this month.  A Romanian gentleman (unfortunately I've forgotten his name) stopped by to talk to the US team.  He had written a great book about the battle, complete with lots of pictures and illustrations of the airplanes involved.  He very kindly donated a book to the team, I believe it will be put into the NASA library.  He also had an exhibition in downtown Ploeisti with recovered parts from the bombers as well as the Axis planes that were shot down.  We had very little time for touristing but we were able to make it out to that.

First off, the refineries as they sit today.

The sky is blue and it's all very peaceful today, however it doesn't take much imagination to hear the guns firing and the bombers low overhead.

And some random pics from the exhibit

This one strikes me for how many craters there are in the farm fields

Ben