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UK F3A Team Member Kevin Caton
About me: I’m from the North-West of England but my job has taken me around the country and I have lived in Suffolk for the past fifteen years, where I work as a Shift Manager at Sizewell B nuclear power station. I’m married with two teenage daughters. Model flying history: Like many others, I was introduced to aeromodelling by my Dad, who was a lifelong modeller. I started with a Keil Kraft Conquest towline glider (built by Dad!) when I was seven or eight. Over the next few years I learned to build and moved through free flight to control line and then onto R/C at the age of eleven. My first R/C model was a DB Tinker biplane with an OS25 and Micron home built radio. I soon progressed onto low wing 40 powered aerobatic types and became interested in aerobatic flying through the coverage in the modelling magazines at that time. We didn’t travel much out of our local area in those days and as a consequence I didn’t seen any ‘proper’ aerobatic planes flown until the late 1970s when we attended an inter club competition. At this event I watched a pilot from Workington called Mike Fyrth fly a Vertigo with a HP61. The plane tore around the sky at speeds I’d never seen before, flying what to me seemed huge manoeuvres. Dad and I were hooked and over the next couple of years we built bigger and better planes and tried to learn the aerobatic schedules. I entered the Nationals in 1979, by which time I was flying a Curare with a Redshift 60 and tuned pipe. I remember watching Ken Binks fly an early version of his Pacemaker and saw how our top pilots flew with tremendous precision in any weather condition. In late 1979 I joined the GBRCAA which had formed about a year earlier. There were contests all over the country and in March 1980 we went to an event at Burscough in Lancashire. I had practised hard over the previous winter learning the Standard schedule in all weather (and you get all weather in Barrow-in-Furness…). On the day of the contest there was a very strong wind which was blowing the snow around (yes really) but we were able to fly and to my surprise I won my class and gained promotion to the next class. I moved through the Senior class in three more vents and found myself in Master (the FAI F3A class at the time) by the middle of the year. I went to Loughborough University – with plane – in late 1980 and found myself able to fly two or three times a week (ah, the joys of being a hard working student…). I flew at a local disused airfield at Wymeswold, which meant I was able to have retracts for the first time. I still flew in all types of weather and made myself fly across the wind to learn how to keep the plane positioned properly. I still think to this day that flying in all conditions is one of the keys to success. Academic life drew to a close and I started work – and travelling up and down the country. This curtailed my flying for a while, though I still competed whenever I could. Over the next few years I got married, then children came along, so my progress was limited. By the early 1990s I had crawled up the rankings and was in contention for a team place. I put in a lot of practice one summer and in 1994 I finally qualified for the UK team. My first World Championship was in Japan in 1995. It was a fantastic experience, from the travelling (ever tried taking two F3A models on an airliner?) to the country (amazing) and not forgetting the competition itself (awe inspiring). In the years since then I won the Nationals twice and became involved with the running of the GBRCAA. I continued to invest time, money and effort into flying and have since flown in three more World Championships and three European Championships. Like most F3A pilots nowadays I get my planes ready built (although I still enjoy building, I have limited time). This year I am flying two Enigmas built by ZN. They are powered by the YS160 DZ and I use Futaba 14MZ radio. The engines and radio are fantastic and when I look back to how I started it’s obvious how far things have come on in the 25 years I have been competing. I’m still inspired when I watch the best pilots and know that with practice I can get better. As long as I believe that I shall continue competing in this branch of aeromodelling that has been so good to me over the years. I have friends all over the UK, Europe and in other continents, all through model flying. Looking at it this way, I feel very fortunate to have received that towline glider for Christmas all those years ago. Kevin Caton July 2006
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Copyright © 2008 Great Britain Radio Control Aerobatic Association
Maintained by Matthew Hoyland,
Ashley Hoyland, Alan Simmonds & John Mee
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