Year review
Technically things have, as previous years, gone well.
We can make and fly a huge range of toy planes. Our efforts to reduce the weight of the remote control planes has been very successful, resulting in little planes with little turning circles. Thanks to Dr Chris, Eric Hook and Graham for their input here.

Bodies
We have a few new fliers, but lost many of the old faces. We still don’t seem to have many fliers who live within 5 miles of Parklands. The average age is still quiet young compared to other venues.
Nutz fliers are still the most innovative in the world. All of the R/C fliers have now sold or retired their larger “old” machines and are now flying 4 and 5 cell planes. Those also flying infra red are flying two and three cell planes. Many of the two cell planes are less than 20g flying weight. We still seem to be the only group regularly designing and making planes with built up fuselages that look scale’ish. There are still a few unpainted planes though.

Money - the root of all evil.
At the beginning of the year we said that this would be the last year we would spend our money subsidising the Aeronutz, we have to break even or we will stop flying at Parklands.
It looks like we will just scrape in to the black if we sell everything and get a reasonable payment for the GrooveJet article. The hall fees and postage for the news letter are still not covered by the entrance fees. The extra money is coming from other sales which is then donated to the Aeronutz by Mark and Simon.

Trouble ahead.
We sell very few plans these days, which was a useful source of cash to subsidise the hall fee/postage.
In the future we can’t riase cash from selling infra red items.
We can write some more articles for magazine but this not the fun it once was.
On the other hand the foot and mouth restrictions will affect outdoor fliers this spring / summer, they seem to be trying indoor flying instead. Our experience is that outdoor fliers are unaware of the possibilities of indoor flying and they are very impressed with our machines when they see them in action. We might get some new fliers as a result, we will certainly make it as easy as possible for them to go Nutz.
Unfortunately next year the hall fees are going up by 15%. So we have a big problem.
As usual we have several options, lateral thinkers might be able to think of some more….
Use a smaller, cheaper hall
Use Parklands but less often
Reduce the hours per night
Use a smaller hall but fly more often
Save money by not issuing the news letter by post
Raise money and donate it to the Aeronutz, not sure how
Give up

We could have 10 underwriters for the hall fees. These people could donate say £50 each at the beginning of the year and if it turns out we loose money over the year we could use this cash to balance the books. Similarly if we have a good year we can give it back. This would be simple to administer. Underwriters would still pay £7 per flying night and M and S would run the Aeronutz as they do now.
We still have two more fun fly events this year so we are not under pressure to sort this out yet.
We cannot spend anytime on administration. So no memberships or committees.
Discuss
Mark

Z Tron's supplier has run out of Tx boxes. If you want to fly IR you can put your name down for get one of the new FMA Direct ones, make or modify your own Tx but you must use 100k pots which are hard to find.
If you want to use a bang bang Rx with coil actuators dont forget to ask for one suitable for the FMA Tx as it is a bit different, all the other Rx are compatible. Anyone who has a Z Tron third generation Tx and would like to sell it please contact Mark.
 

Fly-brain program flies copter
Yomiuri Shimbun
Researchers at the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research in Wako, Saitama Prefecture, have succeeded in operating a radio-controlled model helicopter using a computer program modeled on a fly's brain, an official of the institute announced Wednesday. The research may enable the development of a program able to process data in a similar way to a human brain, the researchers said. The institute's Laboratory for Brain-operative Devices was responsible for developing the program, which was based on a fly's optic nerve system. A fly uses 16 vector variables, including forward, back, right, left and inclination to adjust its position in flight.
The program calculates the helicopter's position, speed and inclination every 0.03 seconds, while a small high-performance camera records the positions of a red point and a green point on the helicopter's body. The program then adjusts the helicopter's position in the air and its motor's output.
The basic control system is preprogrammed in the computer, but it can also learn and master new controls. Though a human beginner can make a model helicopter hover for only a few seconds, even after undergoing 10 hours of training, the computer managed the difficult operation with ease.

Simons computer blew up, but we think its better now. Seems a man with a digger cut through the wires in the street which cause some sort of power surge. Even though the computer was powered down (but still plugged in at the wall outlet) considerable damage was caused. Suggest you allways switch off at the wall outlet when not in use.

butterfly    being out flown by Andrew's F/F electric twin Catalina!

Other than that it's been a quiet month.