163km/h with a Vigor CS
Simon Lockington

Craig hovering his Xcell 60

About a fortnight ago I was at a funfly that was being held in scenic Taupo in New Zealand's North Island, Taupo is a great place and the field there is large and open. However, on this particular weekend although it was nice and sunny it was windy and bitterly cold.

The usual funfly activities of talking crap, seeing what everyone had been up to, looking at people's new toys and doing a bit of flying were well under way when a police car was seen making it's way across the field towards us. Looks were exchanged to see if the guilty one could be identified, but Craig, the funfly organiser declared he'd asked the police man to come out if he had a spare moment and see if he could clock the helis with the radar in the car.

Mike, the policeman, described the equipment in his car and let us look around it and answered all the questions. Then it was time to try the theory out and see if the helis could be clocked by the radar. Some weren't convinced the radar would see the thin cross section of a heli, others wondered how Mike would explain having a heli wedged through his car to his superiors if it all went wrong and I seemed to be the only one who thought the radar might interfere with the heli's electronics and shoot it down. I was all keen to have a go, but someone else had to go first to make sure my theory was wrong.

Front view of Craig's Xcell 60.

True to form, Craig offered to go first and fired up his Xcell 60 and flew off into the distance before turning and heading back towards the police car parked at the end of the runway. He flew the heli past the car safely and turned to land to find out his speed. As I recall it was something like 120km/h or so. However Mike said that could be misleading because the heli had been flying at an angle to the radar and instead of flying past the car, could we fly directly over it? A few nervous looks were exchanged, then Craig had another go and I think clocked up something like 130km/h. I decided that my theory had been disproven and it was probably going to be safe to crank up the Vigor and give it a go.

I let the Vigor warm up while it hovered next to the police car for some pictures then it was time to see what figures it could pull. Being an already windy day, I didn't think it was going to take much to get some good numbers up, so I flew off about 350-400 meters then turned back towards the car with a slight dive and at full stick and the wind picked it up pretty good and soon it was howling back down the field at us, all of a sudden it was on us and I quickly pulled into a steep climb to bleed off speed. Like Craig, I'd been a bit wide on my first run so I notched up another couple of runs before calling it quits with a top speed of 154km/h.

Me (and my styley red hat) sending the Vigor off for another run at the Police car.

I was fairly confident that I could break the 100mph mark though if I really tried.

Soon enough, John Knox decided to give it a go with his newly repaired (from a devastating crash caused by a crystal failure) 91 powered Vigor CS and promptly racked up a 159km/h run. Not to be out done, and seeing that the wind gusts were rising, I ran over to the CS and raised the top end pitch a degree or so ready for another run determined to beat the 160km/h mark.

I flew upwind quite a distance climbed out high with the idea of making a large dive at the police car, the wind was gusting hard as the Vigor turned downwind and I pushed the nose right down until it was pretty much vertical and diving fast down over the runway, as the heli neared 100ft, I began to level out slowly and all of a sudden the heli was past me, over the police car and heading off down the field at a great rate of knots. Thinking that that was about as fast as I was going to get it to go, I landed to the news that I'd gotten up to 163km/h.

Aaron Williams tried with his Kyosho Concept SRII 60, and made around the 140km/h mark. To be fair, he was getting better upwind speed than I as it wasn't as windy when he had a go, and while we're being honest, if there were no wind and we had been doing straight runs instead of dives, I'm pretty certain that all these machines would have had a fairly comparable top speed.

Proof is in the pudding. This was the result of my first set of runs at the car. We would have got pics of my highest run had my camera not run out of batteries!