Heliwood 2019 - the festival
Great weather, even greater moments

The two day long Heliwood is now over - for a year. The Hungarian RC heli festival has been taken in place in a great weather, at a really good location with nice turn up.

The whole weekend was really sunny and even the wind was really moderate - luckily because the road driving to Heliwood is really dusty due to the lack of the rain in the previous week. The flight line is good, even so it's not perfect, but there are no trees or any objects in the flight line. About a kilometre by kilometre north facing open space was waiting for the pilots.

Saturday was the main day of Heliwood providing many programmes. The original schedule had changed a bit, because the electricity supply had a glitch for two hours. This is why the opening ceremony has been cancelled, but other programmes weren't affected.

Full size helicopter demo

A full size Schweizer 300 helicopter arrived to Heliwood at noon piloted by Attila Miklós, and a shorter demo presented by him entertained the spectators. Then the helicopter has landed at Heliwood. Heliwood is a family event as well, therefore children queued up at the helicopter to see that, to sit in for a photo. Attila replied to the questions, showed everything even for the RC pilots.

The kids' tent was busy on both days, many nice pictures were drawn by the children, even more balloon helicopters were born for them. The RC car track was engaged all times by children driving RC cars.

SAB Goblin Kraken - new version

Filip Ban presented the yellow-blue SAB Goblin Kraken at Heliwood, which was the Eastern European premier of this model. Filip amazed the Hungarian pilots and the crowd as well.

 

NaIv cup

One of the main programme of Saturday was the NaIv cup, a challenge course competition. Nine pilots competed there including Filip Ban. The competition is happening on a course around posts against the clock. The fastest pilot wins, but it is not enough to be fast, even the landing precision is important, as each centimetre distance between the middle of the landing spot and the main shaft means one second added on the time result. Cutting the post, crashing the helicopter means out.

The final results

The challenge is harder than it looks. All pilots tried their bests and finally all of them could fly at least one complete round.

 

Kan Poonnoi and the Egodrift

Kan Poonnoi, the team Egodrift and Minzhi Zhi from Tarot arrived early afternoon. Kan presented his flight to the Hungarian crowd, the "he is crazy", "he is insane" were the most typical sentences among the people. Filip and Kan were flying more times, Fritz Schuller from SAB Austria joined to the league later.

Hungarian pilots like Krisztián Nagy, Tamás Tóth and Barna Balogh were also satisfying for the people. Even a fixed wing aircraft by Dávid Kunert presented a great show.

Vintage and custom RC helicopters

Ádám Matics flew with his 36-year-old Schlüter helicopter. Even Filip tried it out. Zsolt Ramocsa presented his intermeshing RC model, which is not finished yet, but it will fly soon. There were more vintage and modern scale helicopters as well.

Sponsors

But this event could not happen without the sponsors. Egodrift and Tarot were represented at Heliwood, and both the Tarot 550/600 and Egodrift Tengu series entered into the Eastern European market at the event officially. The first Egodrift motor sold in Hungary got to the new owner László Kreutz there. ATModels as one of the returning sponsors helped the Heliwood again a lot. XLPower is one of the sponsors didn't have to be invited, the company offered the help by their intention. There were new sponsors, like SAB, MainaX and Rotor Tech, thanks to Filip Ban, they sponsored the event first - and it is hoped not the last - time. AccuRC helped the event's simulator mission to show the new joiners how to start, how to fly. The Heli-Professional also sponsored Heliwood with their fund.

Modellzona and The Best 4U sponsored the event from Hungary. And of course many private people, all the supporters and local helpers were required to make the event so successful as it was. Thanks to all these helps, Heliwood had two family and one modeller raffles with many-may prizes. Heliwood became an unmissable event.

Thanks to the media support of jetfly.hu and other platforms the turn up of new people was higher than the expectation.

Feedbacks

All the pilots from abroad agreed to come next year as well. They really enjoyed the hospitality of the hosts and the local people. City council of Halásztelek expressed that they would like to see Heliwood at Halásztelek next year again. 

Photos and videos coming...