Chad Veich

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The brotherhood is growing rapidly! I think the Hellcat has a bigger fan base than many folks might think. My hangar currently includes three 1/8 and one 1/6 scale Hellcat projects in various states of construction. What follows will probaby be old info for many of you guys but for the sake of the brotherhood I will share it again here. (Any excuse to post pictures of my "babies"!)

First is the prototype of my 1/8 scale design which has been flying now for about 3 seasons. The airplane has far and away exceeded all my expectations for it and flies as good or better than any warbird I've had up to this point. She is 65 inch span, about 11 3/4 pounds, Robart 615 retracts, and an OS .91FX for power. Despite being a bit "porky" the airplane slows down very well and is quite gentle around the stall, even without any flaps. I plan to finish out this flying season with it and then pull it down for a thorough IRAN (Inspect and Repair As Necessary) in order to get it ready for our Scale Masters quailifer in February. While I'm at it I may swap out the .91FX for a DLE 20 as well.









I gotta finish up with my favorite picture of the 'cat together with my beautiful better half. I am her "airplane geek" which she maintains is a term of endearment although I'm not totally convinced.



Second Hellcat in the shop right now is another 1/8 scale built from my plans by good friend Robert Vogel. He built it for warbird racing and, as such, it had little in the way of scale detail and a few airframe mods to suit his tastes. It actually performed pretty well as a race plane (YS 1.40 running 60% nitro!) but an "incident" with another race plane on the course resulted in about an inch of vertical fin being chopped off. At that point Robert decided it was much too big and expensive of a target to be sharing air space with $200 ARF missiles and so it was retired. My brother and I purchased the airframe from him shortly thereafter! Our intentions are to return it back to stock, add a modicum of detail, and re-finish it into an all yellow target tug scheme. My brother is working on it full swing and if all goes well it should be back up and flying before the end of the year.

Below is what it used to look like and I will share updated pictures as progress is made on returning it to warbird status. The black and red is a scale scheme by the way and represents how the overall dark blue full size Hellcat in my previous post used to look back in the 1960's.





Third is yet another 1/8 scale which is my second prototype and reflects the changes needed to add flaps to my design. Along with the flaps this one will get a full cockpit and substantially more surface detail than my red prototype in the hopes of doing a bit of competiton flying with it.



And last but certainly not least (pun intended!) is a 1/6 scale enlargement of my smaller design. This one is getting the full treatment with the hopes that it will be a contest level machine when it is done. Based on how well the 65 inch model flies I am very excited about the potential of this 86 inch span version.