Heliwood 2018
The Hungarian heli festival

The Hungarian RC helicopter festival was held last weekend. Many feedbacks and memories arrived to the organisers so far. It's time to summarise what and how happened.

This was the second - but last - Heliwood in Hungary. Luckily the weather was nice however lighting conditions were a bit dodgy. Many people turned up but it's difficult to tell how many. The reason: there is no ticket at all, therefore organisers could count the number of the cars arriving and leaving, and the secondary numbers can show the amount of the people at the scene.

The most significant feedback has arrived from the food supplier Hamburverda company, who have died under the pressure literally. They had no chance to stop between the morning and the evening. There was a shorter-longer queue at their stand all day long. As they informed the organisers they have sold more than twice more hamburgers than in the previous year.

There were at least 30 families thanks to the children tent, which entertained the little ones all day long with interactive games, freeflyer airplane model making, colouring, drawing. Children could get closer to RC helicopter modelling with various tools like ball balance simulator, RC simulator. Children could drive RC cars as well thanks to RC trial team.

The real helicopter simulator was also busy all day long. But the most important: someone was flying with helicopter always, the flying free time was about 30 minutes all together throughout the day.

Many pilots turned up from Hungary, and numerous from abroad. Maria Pavlou, Andrzej Zolty from United Kingdom, Stefan Finster and Manuel Madaini, the pilots of Horizon Hobby, Fritz Schuller the pilot of Team Goblin Austria and Heli Shop Maurer from Austria, and Antonio Gomez Rosado the factory pilot of XLPower were attending Heliwood making the program more colourful. Tamás Tóth and Barna Balogh from EMH SE Demo Team (the host organisation) also entertained the people there. Krisztián Nagy was flying a smoky show to music. Dávid Kunert probably the best 3D fixed wing pilot in Hungary performed an amazing fixed wing 3D show as well. Few old timer airplanes were flying as well. The youngest RC helicopter pilot was the 8-year-old Antónia Bogdán-Szabó. Heliwood with its programs was a real #KeepRCHelisAlive event.

The queue to flying was managed by a new (originally old) technology called gravity queue. Each pilot has got a debit card sized plastic card. When a pilot wanted to fly, there was a board at the flying field, where the pilot could drop his card int the slot. Each pilot pulled his card out after the flight at the bottom. When the card of a pilot arrived down, the owner pilot was the next to fly. All pilots liked the system. The original version of it was the method of air traffic controllers before the computers about 30 years ago :)

By end of the day, a raffle was held as well. The main prize was given by Align-TRex Models, which was an XLPower Specter 700 kit. The happy owner is Gyula Tóth, who is also an active modeller. There were many other smaller gifts given by Align-TRex Models and Hely-shop.co.uk.

The only program not being held was the demo of Area51-rc, because poor guys couldn't arrive to Heliwood due to the strike action at RyanAir and their cancelled flight days before the event. Dave and Carlos tried to do everything to come to Heliwood, but the airplane ticket prices went up a lot in the last few days due to Sziget Festival in Budapest. Lesson for everyone: if you want to arrive to somewhere, just don't use RyanAir at all.

All pilots and attendees were satisfied and happy. Organisers have got many feedbacks already, but the most important was: Heliwood was a world class event in Hungary. This is because of the sponsors: Align-TRex Models, Area51-rc, XLPower, Hely-shop.co.uk, Paco Modell, 3DJake and finally but last: Magyar Modellező Szövetség (Hungarian Association of Modellers). The sound system was also professional provided by partymusor.com. Thanks for all of them.