Ah, the heavy smell of nitro - it is from a time a long time ago. 25 years ago it meant standing behind 4 Formula One's, each screaming away at 22,000 rpm burning 65% nitro fuel at a rate of 3 oz. per minute waiting for the flag to drop. A day of that and you simply reeked of burnt fuel and oil fumes. I feel for those where we ate in the evenings after a hard day of competition.

But those days are well behind us now, unless Red Bull decides to quit dropping people out of balloons and start pushing model airplanes.

While a wind meter is a nice to have item (they are fairly cheap), I always have a paper towel around that I can tear a corner from and drop. Even on very calm days, I find it useful to pick up a few tuffs of grass to drop to get a final reading of wind direction just before take-off. Too many pilots try to adjust their take-off direction into the wind without actually knowing which way it is really blowing. I tend not to do that, preferring to align with the runway centerline and using ailerons to do proper crosswind take-offs. But when I was just learning, I used every crutch available including standing behind the airplane and going straight into the wind. We are all on a simular path, just at different points.