Here's my Masters story....

We, Scott Anderson and myself, arrived in Orlando about 7 hours before
Hurricane Jeanne on Saturday at 2pm. We were on the 2nd from last flight in
before they closed the airport. We, now including my dad and friend Dave
Stodart, were supposed to leave to go to South Carolina on Sunday, but with
Jeanne, that was delayed until Monday morning. Thankfully I shipped my plane
right to Hartness International so it would be waiting for us when we
arrived...or at least that was the plan. Talking with Mark Hale at HI, he
said that the motors arrived fine, but no plane. So a couple of calls to Tim
Garcia at Hacker Brushless (where I shipped my plane from) and the plane was
tracked down for a Tuesday delivery. Not such a big deal as we arrived about
8:30pm and we were in the middle of Jeanne again. So we went to bed wishing
for a nice Tuesday so we could get some practice in.

Tuesday is a beautiful, sunny, DRY day. I'm all excited cause I can go get
my plane and finally get in some more practice. A call from Mark again lets
me know that there is still no plane. More calls to Tim and he said that it
should be delivered by noon. Well, we've never been on the tour of HI, so we
set it up with Mark to take a tour. What a facility. I can't believe in all
the years that I've been going there I've never taken the tour. The machines
they build and the tools they have I can understand how the airplanes and
parts that are on Pat's planes are made. Incredible! By this time it's
2:15pm and still no plane. More calls and we find out it should be there
before 3pm. So we set off for some things we need for the contest and get
back to HI and the airplane has finally made it. Crate looks like it's had a
rough trip, but at least there are no fork-lift holes in the side.

We load the crate and head out to Triple Tree, contest site, to unpack the
plane and get in a couple of flights. As I'm pulling out the plane, I'm
noticing signs of a rough ride from AZ to SC. half of the formers were
knocked loose, my batteries were broke from the tray they were on, and there
is a crack in my rear deck. But all in all, it is easy to fix, just time
consuming. But an hour later and everything is put together and ready to
fly. We go out to the runway and fuel and wait to fly. I get up there and
start flying, still trimming the plane (only had 6 flights before I left)
and things are going OK. I was having a bit of teething problems with the
ZDZ 160 motor, but other than that, all was good. When I landed I readjusted
the needles and fueled and waited to go fly again. By this time, the sun was
rapidly falling and darkness was upon us. Jason Noll and Andrew Jesky were
flying and I was going to join them, but at that time, Jason was finished
with his flight, so I joined Andrew. This flight wasn't much better than the
first one as the motor wasn't set again. This ZDZ was almost a prototype and
I had to make some changes to it from it's original set-up. I wasn't worried
as I had another new ZDZ 160 new in the box back at the hanger. I ended up
flying until it was too dark to see (for me, others said they couldn't see
it when I took-off) then went back to the hanger to do some finishing work.
After a call to Mike Dooley at RC Showcase, through Ray Labonte and Andy
Kane to get to him (new cell phones without your old phone numbers is a real
bummer) Mike suggested I just put in the new motor and he'll worry about the
old one when he gets it back to the shop. So Scott, Dave and I get to work
on the plane. I start disassembling the front end for the motor swap,
Scott's getting the pilot ready for install and Dave was supervising...lol.
Finding out that there are some things that I forgot at home, I had to
borrow a bunch of parts from Ivan Kristensen, and that was most everything
but the kitchen sink. He helped me set-up my new TME Simple Smoke pump that
I still hadn't installed, and even had some other parts I needed, at least
that night. By midnight the new motor was in and we fired it up and test ran
it. What a dream. A couple of tweaks on the needles and she was purring. I
wanted to fly I was so excited, but knew I'd have to wait until morning. I
installed the TME smoke system and put the cowling back on. By 1:30am, we
made it back to the hotel and looking forward to the next day.

Photo courtesy of Carol McKinney