Thank you very much, Max Schilt!

Max served as president of FaKo-F4-Scale for many years and was honored at the 2018 delegates’ meeting. In Reto Senn, the club found an experienced successor to lead this highly successful and demanding division.

Max Schilt grew up in Zollbrück in the hilly Emmental region. There, he successfully completed an apprenticeship as a mechanic. This training shaped Max and laid the foundation for his involvement in model aviation. Toward the end of the 1970s, the Schilt family moved to Hofstetten near Brienz. His interest in aviation was already evident back then, and so the young father joined the staff at the Unterbach/Meiringen military airfield. During this time, there was a tremendous transformation in aircraft and their armament. Max experienced this firsthand and was responsible for arming the various types of aircraft used by the Swiss Army. When the Air Force acquired drones and they needed to be piloted, Max was able to train as a drone pilot thanks to his knowledge from model flying. He still works in this capacity today.

As already mentioned, Max has been an active model builder and model aviator for many years. Building models offers the opportunity to try out new things and thus satisfy one’s curiosity, bring one’s own ideas to life, and find innovative solutions. Max has made full use of this opportunity. When the first four-stroke engines came onto the market, they were very quickly incorporated into the models from Hofstetten. But it didn’t stop there. Max also successfully built his own engines in both single- and multi-cylinder configurations. His training as a mechanic proved invaluable in this endeavor. For production, one of the first CNC milling machines was purchased at the time, though it was still extremely prone to errors. To ensure the models remained lightweight, superglue was used very early on instead of the wood glues that had been standard up to that point. The combination of building and flying led Max to scale model building, which he pursues with great success. His participation in World and European Championships, where he achieved very good rankings, confirmed his dedication to this field. Max is also actively involved in the scale modeling scene in other ways. In 2013, thanks to his initiative, the Jet World Masters were held in Switzerland, and this year he is once again the organizer of the Scale World Championships in Meiringen. In addition, as mentioned earlier, Max presided over the FaKo-F4-Scale for many years with great success.

Max is a popular member of the Interlaken Model Flying Club. His extensive knowledge and willingness to help are widely appreciated. His models must always be very well powered—pushed to the limits of what’s possible and beyond. Take, for example, a Hotliner designed for three LiPo cells, which he powered with six cells. The result was a loud roar as it flew past at full throttle, a gentle shower of balsa wood from the wings, and a fuselage that had burrowed further into the meadow.

Dear Max, on behalf of the Sports Department and the rest of the SMV Board, I would like to thank you very much for your great dedication to model aviation.

Peter Georgi, Head of the SMV Sports Department