Čertík

A name that stands out from the line

While the greater part of the Hiesbök range carries the names of insects, Certik stands apart along with Beda, Fida and Jirka. The brand keeps mainly Czech names for its hand-launched gliders, and among them there is even a model named after the L-410 Turbolet airliner. The range therefore comes across more as a workshop family than as a product line with numerical designations.

Work at the bench

A free-flight glider sets the modeler a different task from a plastic model. Here you are not gluing finished castings; what arises is a lifting surface that has to be straight, symmetrical and above all light. The wing is sanded into a profile, the dihedral of both halves is set and the fuselage is aligned so that the tail surfaces do not form a nonsensical angle with the wing. Every extra gram tells: on a hand-launched glider weight is the direct enemy of flight time.

Trimming is part of the build

The finished model is not completed at home but out of doors. The first throws tend to be short and serve only so that the modeler can see where the glider is heading: whether it sinks, climbs and drops onto a wing, or descends smoothly. The weight in the nose and the setting of the tail are adjusted accordingly. Calm, windless evening hours over a mown meadow are ideal for that, because the wind does not distort the behavior of the model.

Why a hand-launched glider

In modeling clubs this discipline is taken as the gateway. It teaches the basic things, dihedral, the center of gravity and trimming, before the modeler starts on vehicles where a mistake costs considerably more.