Science and Engineering Festival
April 28-29, Washington D.C. A selection of photos taken at the festival by Bonnie and Glen Simpers, Jimmy O’Tool, and Tony Pavel – Thanks for the coverage.
Click here for Glen’s illustrated brochure – DC Maxecuter handout for the Festival with email links
And a note about the festival from Glen
“All,
Participation in the Festival resulted in a number of new connection, flying opportunities, and five pages of new contacts. AMA created a nice brochure that featured the Maxecuters information and we gave away boxes of NFFS Free Flight magazines, old Flying Aces Newsletters, old Max Fax newsletters, and a thousand NFFS brochures.
The significant points:
The Engineering Week organizers and the National Building Museum have planned to show people what engineers do on 2/16/13. The leader of the effort asked us to come fly. We were asked to apply as an exhibitor at the event and will work with them to organize space and time. This will be a flying demonstration and not a contest. They expect thousands of families with kids to attend.
The YMCA has a “The Sky’s the Limit” Thingamajig Invention Convention on 7/26/12 and they would like us to demonstrate flying models for the expected 14,000 kids. It is in the Show Place Arena – a large indoor space that is used for indoor horse shows and High School graduations. It is big but the floor is dusty (unless they put the flooring down that they use for graduations).
We talked to the Manager of the “How Things Fly” Gallery in the National Air and Space Museum about ways to show people actual flying. Some challenges but it is a project in progress.
The RC Flier who flew models during the Festival for the AMA works at Pax. River. on UAVs. Two times a year he organizes for the hanger to be cleared out for indoor flying. The local RC people have been doing this for a while so we talked about inviting the Free Flight crowd to joint them. The Great Mills High School that is near Pax. River has an Engineering Club and some flying goes on there. They also seem to fly at times at Weber (Webster) Field – the Navy’s UAV flying site in southern MD.
A Professor at Morgan State in Baltimore is trying to organize an outreach program to area youth using flying activities. He has already touched base with AMA and looks forward to a partnership.
A Professor at Delaware State University hopes to use model aircraft to teach engineering students about flight. I told her about Bud Carson’s success at the Naval Academy and said that we can help her set something up.
A professor at University of Maryland Eastern Shore is looking for help in flying UAV for experiments. I indicated that we might be able to help him link up with Navy UAV folks. Maybe they can work something out and who knows how this might help modelers.
Meanwhile, Pat Daily has identified an opportunity to fly at the Rassawek Spring Jubilee in Columbia, VA on May 19/20. Maybe a demonstration there will open the door for more flying on the southern tier of the Maxecuters.
The Festival drew people from all over the United States. Some were exhibitors and some visitors to Washington, DC. I promised them that I would try to link them up with fliers near their home. I know some people (particularly in N.C. and West Virginia) but it would be great if you can also give me names and emails of fliers in the following areas. Some of these are educators who are trying to set up an activity for kids using airplanes and some are people who want to fly.
• Delaware
• Dayton, Ohio
• New York City area
• Central PA (I lost the bubble on where exactly)
• South Carolina
• Near Cornell in NY
• and someone from California who then forgot to note by his email that they were looking for a flier – now I don’t know who’s name goes with the conversation.
Glen Simpers — DC Maxecuters”
grfreeflight@hotmail.com