A Free Flight Life

Two people holding yellow model gliders, smiling on a grassy field.

Free Flight Sport

Two people smiling, holding yellow model gliders on a grassy field. — (L-R): Daniel Guo and Tim Batiuk are shown at Lost Hills in 2023. Tim mentored Daniel for a year; Daniel proceeded to win the 2024 FAI F1D World Championship for Indoor Model Aircraft.

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TRIBUTES ARE POURING in following the sudden loss in July of National Free Flight Society (NFFS) Free Flight (FF) Hall of Famer Tim Batiuk of Brea, California. Tim died unexpectedly at home, just about a week before he was to attend the AMA Outdoor FF Nats in Muncie, Indiana.

Tim was born into a family of FF fliers in Denver in 1950. A FFer since his childhood, he was an early member of my club, the Martin Model Masters (now the Magnificent Mountain Men), a storied club of Martin engineers that included his father, George Sr., Ray Combs, Herb Kothe, Ken Phair, Bill Etherington, and many other famous names.

Tim attended the University of Wyoming, where he was a standout track and cross-country athlete. Soon after college, he started a career in education in California, where he lived the remainder of his life. All the while, he remained active in FF at Taft, Lost Hills, and other West Coast sites, often flying with his brother, George, and his father.

In the early 2000s, Tim started regularly attending the AMA Nats and also traveled by air to regional contests in pursuit of the then-new NFFS National Cup. The National Cup is a calendar-year championship award for the various model types within FF (Glider, Rubber, Gas, Nostalgia, etc). His forte was the Glider events: Hand-Launch Glider (HLG), Catapult, and Classic Towline. Tim won the National Cup in Glider a record 21 straight times from 2002 to 2023—a feat that will likely never be equaled. He won individual Nats titles 10 times between 2003 and 2023 and had 19 Team Nats wins during that same stretch.

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was his AMA HLG national record, which was set in March 2010 at Lost Hills, California. Tim recorded 22 max flights that day—only 10 seconds short of a max on his 23rd flight. This incredible record might never be broken.

NFFS National Cups Championship Series, 2000 to Present

The NFFS National Cups for Outdoor FF are intended to encourage travel to contest sites in the US, Canada, and Mexico. For each flier, the six highest scores earned in each model class during the calendar year are counted for the final total, but only two scores may be counted from the same flying site.

Exemptions from the two-site rule (that might count for a seventh score) are: the Southwest Regionals, held in January in Arizona; the King Orange International, held in March in Florida; the AMA Outdoor FF Nats, held in July to August in Indiana; and the Rocky Mountain Championships, held in September in Colorado.

A serious National Cups contender must fly in at least two home-field contests and travel to as many as four out-of-town contests during a calendar year. The cups are stored under glass in the AMA National Model Aviation Museum and are awarded annually at the AMA Outdoor FF Nats.

Tim set the record with his Turn-Up design, which also received NFFS Model of the Year honors. This record-setting model now rightly resides in a place of honor at the National Model Aviation Museum in Muncie.

In recent years, Tim’s passion was the National Youth Aviation Academy (NYAA)—a FF club for teenagers that he co-founded in 2023. Under his leadership, NYAA grew rapidly in 2024 and 2025. There are now more than a dozen students and parents actively flying FF models weekly at their home field in Perris, California. Tim’s expert mentorship and unmatched energy are the main reasons that NYAA has thrived. The club put multiple members on the US FAI F1ABP Junior World Championships for Free Flight Model Aircraft team in 2023-2024 and is a virtual lock to do the same for the next Junior FF World Championships in 2026. I’ll think of Tim always as the very best of what our hobby/sport has to offer. He was an elite flier—a natural born into the sport—but he was also a visionary organizer and leader … and an even a better friend. No one in the history of FF was a more well-rounded and affable gentleman.