Frazer Briggs in action

One of Frazer's knife edge passes

Darryll's Z230 on a spray run (note the canopy in the background...)

Curtis flying my Voyager while Darryll interrogates

Curtis increasing the value of a Vigor that was for sale.

Curtis and Carla Youngblood

Curtis Youngblood in New Zealand
Simon Lockington

Another guest pilot was New Zealand's Tournament of Champions pilot, Frazer Briggs. Frazer is a regular at TOC and is regularly placed in the top 10 as well as making fourth place in 1999. Frazer's plane is awesome, easily the biggest one I've seen in person.
As soon as the plane left the ground it did a full roll into knife edge and flew the length of the field. Frazer's display included lots of knife edge stuff as well as things called 'Blenders' which I can really only describe as the plane equivalent of a heli death spiral, at the end of this manoeuvre the plane ended up right side up barely moving and it never looked like it was going to drop out of the sky or anything. Then a full speed slow single roll that started at one end of the run way and finished at the other, followed by the plane doing what can really only be described as a hovering 'waltz' right in front of Frazer, gently rocking back and forward, rolling slowly in a 20 meter square with the smoke on. Just incredible.
Frazer's next flight was to music and you couldn't help but grin at the incredible timing and fluidity of the manoeuvres in time with the music. A complete rolling circle in time to the opening beats of "Eye of the tiger" with the plane doing quarter rolls on each beat. It was just awesome. If you ever get the chance to see someone like Frazer in action, don't miss it!

Another novelty was Darryll Putt's JR Z230 Gasser, equipped with spraying gear. Darryll's home made spray unit uses an electric pump to pump out about 3.8 litres of water through the forward mounted spray boom. Although the Z230 does lift it all ok, Darryll very nearly came to grief when on his first run ran into a bit of power settling and the fully loaded Z230 just kept coming down until it hit the ground square on it's skids and took off again, but not before it threw it's canopy off! Darryll completed the demo without any further incident.

Mark Hutching flew his camera mount equipped heli taking high altitude pictures of the field which came out remarkably well. Mike Sutton, the New Zealand distributor for Coolpower, was running a gas powered RC car around a course that he had setup which was attracting all kinds of attention from the public.

Saturday night was a buffet dinner held at the hotel where everyone enjoyed a good meal before boarding a bus to take them to the night flying site while those of us who were flying took cars. The site was in a farmer's paddock overlooking a large lake and to get there we had to cross rutted farm tracks, nasty gateways and undulating paddocks. Some of our cars aren't known for their ground clearance properties and we bounced and scraped our way to the site. Once there however, there was no wind and the sky was nice and dark. Curtis was up first and launched into all the tricks he did in the day time, not backing off even a little bit, and still ending with a stratospheric autorotation even though he really did have to guarantee that it was going to land by his feet as we were flying off a hill. Don't even know why I worried, the heli landed perfectly back at his feet…
For some strange reason there were a distinct lack of volunteers to fly straight after Curtis. However, after a fair bit of

prompting I decided to give it a crack. Firstly the battery level meter was showing lower voltage than I expected, but I thought I could get at least one flight in like that. Then the engine was a real pig to start. Finally I got out and brought the heli into a hover only to notice the night wire seemed to be flickering a little. At first I thought it was my eyes playing up on me, but it continued so I landed and turned to the people and asked if they could see the lights flickering? To which they yelled "What lights???", I turned around to see my night wire had gone out! Luckily I was on the ground when this happened so I shut down and went to investigate. It seems when I wired tied the night wire to the heli, I must have crushed the internals of it and it was shorting it out with the vibration of the heli. That was it for my night flying.
Aaron Williams went up next with some strobing lights on the end of his skids which looked really cool. Wayne Ratcliffe and Steve Engle went up next and put on a good show as the misty rain started to set in. It was back to the vehicles for the adventurous drive back off the site to the motel.

Sunday dawned to overcast skies with the threat of rain, but luckily that didn't eventuate and hot clear skies returned for another day of flying. Today was even more relaxed with Curtis tirelessly working on everyone's helicopters and performing demos in between. One helicopter he worked on was my Webra 91 powered Vigor. It seemed to be running inconsistently and leaning out for no apparent reason. After a 20 second hover and a bit of a look around he said he thought the problem was that the bolts that hold the cylinder barrel down on the crankcase might not be tight enough. We pulled the engine and sure enough, the bolts were able to be cranked up another quarter turn. Installed the engine again and it ran much more consistent. It was this kind of diagnosis skill that saved me hundreds and hundreds of dollars, tonnes of time and untold amounts of frustration.

There were only two minor crashes during the weekend, a Vigor CS busted it's blades at the bottom of an auto, as did a Voyager 50 after a flameout. The Voyager was back in the air soon after.

As the day wore on, people started to pack up and head out the gate for home and Curtis began disassembling his machines in preparation for the trip to Neil Harker's beach house where Curtis and Carla could spend a couple of days away from helicopters before flying out to Melbourne for the Australian funfly at Shepperton.

Having never met Curtis in person before, I was pleased to see that he tells it like it is. While being a great ambassador for JR products he was more than willing to concede that some JR products are in need of improvement. It was his seemingly unbiased opinions and willingness to spend as much time as it took to help anyone no matter what they flew or what their skill level was that really impressed me.

The comments I heard from all those who attended was that it was a great weekend and well worth the money and time spent getting Curtis and Carla to New Zealand. Having someone of Curtis' calibre demonstrate their skills and expertise to us has proved invaluable and no doubt will help increase the overall skill level of pilots throughout the country.

The organising committee would like to thank all those who supported our event and helped make it possible to bring one of the world's finest helicopter fliers to New Zealand!