Nice little get away time...

Posted on Tuesday, June 26th 2012 at 1:00 AM
By Mark J. Sullivan

I was on vacation for the past while here, and was able to get away to a great flying event held in Rapid City, South Dakota entitled "The Flying Giants 2012 HUCKFEST".
It basically consists of a bunch of crazy pilots flying low and fast, in all sorts of aerobatic planes worth several thousands of dollars per plane for the most part....those guys can do the most amazing things with those planes and made it look way too easy while doing it.
I went up there and got to stay with my buddy John Pondish and his great wife Fay, of the Rapid City RC PROPBUSTERS club there, and we flew some smaller planes of ours too.....not just the big boys were flying....
Everyone....and I do mean EVERYONE was so very helpful and courteous to each other the entire time there....
They held a "$1000.00 THROWDOWN" event at noon on Saturday and 9 pilots registered to win either $500.00 for first place...$300.00 for second place...and $200.00 for third place finishes respectively. Talk about HUCKIN HARD AND FLYING LOW!!!....imagine dragging a wing and horizontal stabilizer through the grass runway at full throttle....and doing it on purpose too!!!

Night Flying under the lights with a foamy and flying through the fireworks display!!!

The two foamy pilots can really fly incredibly!!!

I thoroughly enjoyed the entire trip, even tho it ended wayyyy too soon, and I was able to get a few pictures with my cruddy cell phone camera, so naturally the quality is not up to the Pro's standards of picture taking of course.

It looks as if the pilot just dropped a loaded bomb!!!

I need to download the other Giant Scale plane pictures off of my cell phone yet and put them up here on the club's web blog yet.
Pictures to include are some shots of even one of my planes that went down and crashed there....My Red and White Great Planes Big Stick .40 size plane had a front wing mounting lug fail on it while I was up flying Saturday morning early and it met an untimely demise w/ total loss of the fuselage...kind of hard to fly when the wing decides it wants to depart from the plane on its own....SIGGGHHH.

Of course I was able to score a great deal from a fellow pilot up there at the event, on a CAP 232 OS glow powered plane to replace the Stick.

I hope to get it ready to fly in the next day or so at the latest.
There were several giant scale planes that went down to their early demise while HUCKING them also, including a Composite built 43% Extra 540 gasser that is totaled out...along with a lot of other sizes of planes that went down from pushing the planes and event sooooo hard.....it was an awesome time.....the DJ was great....people fantastic....catered whole pig BBQ on Saturday night with all the trimmings was to absolutely die for also...The folks that hosted this event were the RC Aces Flying club along with the RC Propbusters of Rapid City, SD in conjunction with the traveling national tour of the 2012 Flying Giants Huckfest tour...Go to www.flyinggiants.com for more info about the event too...I'll post the other pictures as soon as I get them loaded and ready to post here....possibly Tuesday June 26th...
Quite a bit of wind and some sprinkles of rain mixed, with very heavy clouds of dust, made for a dirty truck and trailer to get back into shape now that I made it back home...