Robinhood 63

I'm looking for the plans for this model. If anyone in the ng has a set they'd be willing to part with, I'd appreciate hearing from you. I'm interested in buying the plans, or borrowing them long enough to visit Kinko's & get a copy. I'll pay for the postage both ways.

I've seen several members of the Robinhood family in flight; one in particular was a '63 I saw some years ago at the Santa Clara County Model Aircraft Skypark (Tomcats) in Morgan Hill, California. The model was built and flown by a man named Dick Bard, who powered the ship with an Enya .53 four-stroke engine, and he also added a clever balsa cowl, not called for in the original design. I took a couple of photos of the airplane, and posted them in a Yahoo photo album here:

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There are a few other snapshots of note: the sequence of a drone launch I took during US Navy maneuvers off the Eastern Seaboard in 1976. The Northrop drone
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was powered by a four-cylinder McColloch engine, and launched with a rocket booster. I also witnessed the equally-impressive flight of a turbojet-powered drone, launched from the ship's helo deck in a similar fashion, with the turbine spooled up to full power, and hurled aloft with two rockets! The noise produced by all of these operations cannot be effectively described...

The Sig Kougar was a model I began building in 1983, and the airplane has something of a storied and iconic history:

I had to postpone its completion for several years. Eventually it was finished and rolled out for its maiden flight on the morning of October

31, 1987. I thought the plan would be cancelled by a series of Pacific storms that had passed through the Bay Area all week, but fortune prevailed and it was cool and overcast on Halloween Day when I arrived at the Pioneers field in Santa Clara. This was my first low-wing, sport/pattern plane, and I had arranged for one of the most experienced club officers, a helpful man named Roy Criswell, to fly the Kougar initially, and trim the ship for straight and level flight.

Roy was busy with several other club members who were queued up for instruction, so I relaxed on the bench with the airplane nearby, fueled up and ready to go; And right at that moment, serendipitously it seems, I met Ken Willard, the prolific model aircraft designer and longtime columnist at RC Modeler magazine. He'd brought one of his diminutive-but-classic airplanes with him to fly at the field, but first asked around if anyone needed any help. Ken Willard assisted me in firing up the Kougar, he taxied the plane out to the runway and flew the model for about ten minutes before shooting a picture-perfect landing on the Pioneers' airstrip. I mentioned to Ken Willard with some pride that I'd been pleased to build and fly several of his models in the past, and had enjoyed reading his popular column in RCM.

In February 1977, my ship had just returned to the USA after a 7-month patrol of the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Fleet. I went for a walk one day with my camera to take a few snapshots of the flight activity at Norfolk NAS: Astonishingly, I came upon the famed C-47/R4D, "Que Sera Sera," which had landed at the geographic south pole in

1956. The airplane - or what was left of it - was sitting in the middle of a field, surrounded by an eclectic assortment of mothballed airplanes and helicopters. I'm pleased to discover that the craft has since been restored by the Smithsonian Institution, and is apparently on loan at the moment to the National Museum of Naval Aviation at NAS Pensacola.
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Best regards, Sandpebble
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sandpebble
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Wow! Some concidences that.

BTW, mighty narrow runway that Kouger is sitting on. If Ken Willard made a picture perfect landing on that runway, then maybe he should have done some pattern competition back then.

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Sport Pilot

Just a note of clarification - sorry for the confusion about the Kougar's photo. The airplane was first flown at the Pioneer's field in Santa Clara, California, in 1987. I later flew the model at the Tomcats field where I met Dick Bard & saw his Robinhood 63. The snapshot in my Yahoo photo album was taken in 1990 on the south diagonal taxiway leading to the 500' runway at SCCMAS (Tomcats) in Morgan Hill.

Reply to
sandpebble

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