F R M

At 7am on Saturday January 9, a group of money laden modelers from FRM, as well as members from the Visalia, Madera and Turlock clubs, left Clovis to begin our 1^st Annual AMA Trek to the 2010 Convention in Ontario, CA. After a stop in Visalia to welcome aboard several members from their club, we settled in for nearly 5 hour bus ride.

Little did we know, however, that we were in for a lesson in climatology. As you all know, when a warm and a cold front meet, precipitation occurs. Well, it seems that when the "warm front" created by the 48 male bodies aboard the bus met the "cold front" created by the cold fog outside the bus, it rained on the driver's side of the windshield! Now our driver, having 2.2 million miles of driving experience, knew exactly how to handle the crisis. He immediately turned on the defroster and immediately discovered that it was inoperative along with the heating system.

The Curtiss "Jenny" was to World War One as the Stearman was to World War Two in the field of military pilot training. There was nothing about the airplane to make it superior in any way to its contemporaries of the time, being in no way either an outstanding flying machine or having any notable performance characteristics. It achieved fame solely because it was there, happening to be in production at a time when both U.S. and British military forces needed large numbers of the particular type for pilot training programs.

For a time, Curtiss' only competition was the Standard Model J, built by Standard Aero Corporation and powered by the Hall-Scott A-7A engine. This power plant proved to be so unreliable, though, that all 1,600 aircraft built for the Army had to be withdrawn from service in 1917, leaving the Jenny with a monopoly in the trainer field.