Busterlooza

Every event has an origin story. BUSTERLOOZA is a recently (2018) adopted Skyhawk tradition brought to us by one of our distinguished club members: Raymond Lefrancois. The plane - BUSTER, the legend - BUSTER, here's how a simple building and sweet flying model aircraft was born...

A handful of us started flying standard Class B AMA Scale combat at the Jordan Lake field around 2004 or 2005. The planes were all different, heavy, prone to damage, and glow powered. After a couple years, two of us tried a few small electric models that we found on RCGroups. The advantages were immediately apparent; the planes were lighter and bounced rather than blew apart, cheaper and quicker to build, field repairs were a cinch, AND the performance of the models were the same – any advantage was due to the pilot’s skill (or in his case, luck).

After a season of fiddling with wingspans, chords, the size of ailerons and elevators, and moving the Kline/Fogelman step and CG back and forth, the design stabilized in 2009 – it has not changed since then. However, modest or cosmetic changes have occurred and are always encouraged – as long as the wing’s dimensions and the power systems are the same. This is to maintain the “only advantage is in the pilot” concept. On the other hand, add a rudder servo, use two aileron servos instead of one, add winglets, machine guns, whatever go for it.

The main advantage of this design is that it accentuates the fun and satisfaction of building with Fan Fold Foam – which allows so much leeway with your own creativity!

Raymond introduced the Buster to our club in 2017 and suggested that it would be a fun and easy build-a-long for our members. In February 2018, we held a special club meeting and learned from the Buster Master himself. Raymond set us all off to commence building our versions of the legend so we would be ready for Spring to start competing for bragging rights a competition rightly named BUSTERLOOZA!