Why I Love RC Airplanes

Hello, my name is Patrick and I am a flight-o-holic.  I have been fascinated with airplanes and flying as long as I can remember.  As a kid, growing up in the 70's and 80's, my free time was occupied with anything airplane related that I could get my hands on or invent for myself.  The earliest airplanes that I built were simple strips of wood nailed together.  I was probably 6 or 7 at that time.  This obsession led me to taking flight lessons beginning at the age of 15.  I still harbor the love of flight at 41.

My elementary and middle school years were filled with model rockets and balsa airplanes.  In my younger years, I spent hours tossing little "delta dart" foam gliders in my yard and studying the way they moved through the air.  I'd make minor adjustments to the trailing edges, studying the way these affected the flight of these awesome little planes.  I wish I could buy them today!

I read every book about WWII aviation I could get my hands on in junior high.  My favorite, which I shamefully can't remember the name of, was about the Air Apaches.  This squadron of airmen flying B-25s in the Pacific raided Japanese bases as lower than tree top level.  Their bombers did not have the greenhouse nose.  It was replaced with 6, 0.50 caliber machine guns.  In order to bomb, they attached drouge chutes to the ordinance so the aircraft and airmen would not be blown out of the air by their own weapons.  I was enthralled!  I still think the B-25 is one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built.

I was fortunate enough to take a trip to California in the mid-1980's.  The highlight of this trip, for me, was a visit to the Mojave Airport.  Here was the home of Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites.  Dick Rutan gave a tour of the shop, explaining the construction of the Voyager which he would, in the following year, pilot around the world without refueling with his girlfriend and copilot, Jeana Yeager.  Along with an amazing set of cutting edge aircraft, Mojave hosted other rare birds.  F-86's taxied mere yards from me.  Thundercheifs sat behind a hanger awaiting refurbishing.  A myriad of Rutan designed airplanes speckled the tarmac.  To me, it was heavan.  Years later, Rutan would produce the spacecraft that won the X Prize.

The summer of 1986 was one of my most memorable.  I had been to many EAA fly-ins, but this summer I went to Oshkosh.  My brain was overloaded!  It was such an amazing experience for me!  I saw some of the rarest, newest and strangest airplanes at that time.  The most remarkable of that incredible week was hearing Bob Hoover and Gen. Chuck Yeager exchange stories from flight school, the war and as test pilots.  They had lived the life that I wanted!  Incredible.

Later that year, I soloed a Cessna 150 on my 16th birthday.  I could not have cared less about a drivers license.  I wanted to fly!  My self-raised flight lesson funds ran out.  My local flight instructor, also a crop duster, died of cancer.  College came along followed by a wife then a family.  I never did complete my flight training.  Maybe someday.  Maybe someday I'll build that homebuilt airplane I've always wanted to build.  Hell, maybe it will even be one of my own design.

For now, I keep that love of flight burning by building and flying RC airplanes.  I traded in my career of mechanical engineering for one of teaching.  Despite what the politicans would tell you, teaching public school pays one hell of a lot less than a comporable professional career.  I'll gladly trade that money to teach kids.  It is horribly frustrating at times, but the rewards of making a difference (as cliche as it sounds) far outweigh any monetary compensation.  Along with another teacher in my school, I run an RC build club.  The art room looks like a miniature airport/airplane junkyard.  We have kids building, flying, and (much to the dismay of some parents) crashing a variety of airplanes.  It takes me back to that time, when I was a young kid dreaming of flight!