Airplanes

I have built many model airplanes over the  years, beginning with the very first one (I remember it clearly) when I was 7 or 8.   It was a Stinson Voyager, and I painted it dark green and hung it from the ceiling of my bedroom.  I remember looking at it hanging there and saying to myself:  "This is the first of many."  In those days there was a little dime store in downtown Caledonia that had a stack of these kits on the shelf for 49 cents each.  I built a bunch of them but none have survived the years.

My first flying model was a plastic U-control plane with an .049 glow engine in bright red.   I loved it but I never could get the motor to run properly and so it never left the ground.   I remember the hours that my closest friend and I spent trying to get that engine running.   We used a huge 1 1/2 volt carbon telephone battery and flipped the prop with our fingers.  But the motor continued to sputter and never developed enough rpms to pull the plane up.

Some years later, I was given a K&B .19 glow engine for Christmas and subsequently built a larger plane (I do not remember the name of the kit design- it might have been Bobcat?) to house the motor.   It was designed for U-control and I remember spending many hours to do a good job and make it look nice.  And then my friend and I went up to the north end of town where there was a large blacktop parking lot and flew it.   It went up real nice, went around once, and smashed into the ground, destroying the plane.

Subsequently, I built several free flight planes and flew them successfully, all of the same general design as the Viking.   But when they flew properly, I always lost them.   I never could find the self-control to limit the amount of fuel I put aboard and they always flew off into the sunset with too much of it.   I remember one of them flew off over the local golf course southwest of town and another one flew off to the north over a friend's farm.   I never recovered a free flight plane that flew successfully.

I always wanted radio control because I knew that it was the only way I would ever fly a plane the way I wanted to and have any chance of recovering it.   The problem was that in those days, money was tight and RC was expensive.   It also used vacuum tubes and high-voltage batteries which cost a lot and didn't last long.   But eventually, I did manage to acquire a simple one-channel outfit, in 1959.   It was a kit that I assembled in my dorm room at  college.   I soon realized, however, that it was going to be extremely difficult to control an aircraft with only one channel and so I installed the radio gear in a boat that I built.     Display models   Flying models