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I didn’t receive this in time to present it before the event, but Associate Vice President Rick Cawley shared a great event with photos by Marvin Mauricio Alvarez.
East Bend, North Carolina, was the place to be in June for the 3rd Annual Ed Wolfcamp Memorial Giant Scale Warbird and Vintage Aircraft event. It included warplanes and Golden Age aircraft at the Riverside Aero Modelers Society (www.riversiderc.com). Flying machines had plenty of action throughout the day, with the different eras of warbirds and vintage models filling the sky during the five-day event.
Some of the more notable flights were done with the Gee Bees—Chad Cotsamire with a CARF Models R2 and Ronnie Lambert with a Hostetler 33% Gee Bee Z model, doing inverted passes and knife-edge flights down the runway one after another. You name it, they did it all. Curtis Switzer flew a 40% World War I Fokker Dr.I that did impressive scalelike maneuvers. They even had a huge gaggle of roughly 17 airplanes in the air at once.
For you World War II people, there were three Lavochkin La-7s, all powered with Moki 250 radial engines that were flown by Butch Pendergrass, Herb Johnson, and Durwin Cartmel. Saturday afternoon, the awards were given to the pilots who really demonstrated the scale flying that represented the era of their aircraft.
Seventy-plus pilots came from as far north as Pennsylvania and as far south as Florida. There was on-site camping, so everybody came with their campers to camp out for the multiday event. After a full day of flying, there was always the eating, so the grills were all fired up and the bull started flying. After-hours activities were almost as good as during the daytime. You never knew what you’d see.
If you come to this fly-in, you will not go away hungry. The cooking is over the top and goes with all of the after-dinner conversation about the past few days of flying and camaraderie.
Go fly and have fun safely.