Trivial Pursuits

One thing I remember about the dorm environment at Keesler AFB is that fads tended to spread really quickly, and so it was with "line control" planes during the spring and summer of 1973.

The "devotees" were divided into 2 distinct groups:

The first were the recreational / creative types. They made planes out of things like beer cans and cigar boxes - the stranger the better (I'm amazed some of them actually flew)... That group tended to use the standard ".049" cox engines and congregated in the area in front of the squadron building.

The second group consisted of the speed / skill types... Their planes were much larger (2 to 3 foot wingspans) and were hand crafted out of balsa and silkspan with engines 5 to 10 times more powerful than the ones the "creatives" used. Some of those planes reached actual speeds of 90 MPH, which necessitated a lot of space - so that crowd used the baseball fields across Falcon Street.

Aside - I need to step back in time here:
When I was 10 years old I really wanted a line control airplane but my mom wouldn't buy me one (they were too expensive) so I saved up my allowance and got myself a Cox F4U Corsair. (The price was around $12 in 1963 which is roughly $100 in 2014). It was absolutely beautiful, and I was totally fascinated by it. I spent countless hours examining how the controls and the engine worked - I loved that thing... But the first time I actually fired it up it scared the living crap out of me. I had no idea the freaking thing would be that loud, and as a result I wouldn't get anywhere near it when it was running.
So, that summer my dad and I would occasionally head over to the playground at Chatham Park Elementary School (Havertown, Pa) and he'd fly it while I watched from a "safe" distance... He was really good (not surprising since he'd been a WWII fighter pilot) and a sizable crowd gathered whenever we were there.
One day dad was making some low altitude passes around the playground when a poodle (apparently thinking the Corsair was a noisy bird) came running out of the crowd, jumped up and caught the propeller in it's mouth... The pooch stood there stunned for a few seconds (I'm betting that really hurt) and then ran off yelping with it's owner close behind (neither the plane nor the dog suffered any significant harm)... It took me a long time to stop laughing. I mean, we were all watching the plane going around and suddenly it had a mid-air collision with a flying poodle... Yeah - maybe you had to be there :-) But the point is that although I really liked line control planes I had no desire to fly one.

And back to 1973:
My roommate Juneau was one of the guys that went totally hardcore. He got hold of a used ".35" engine and a plane kit, and we got to work.
Now - up to that point I'd had no idea what was involved in building a high-performance model plane... The kit was nothing more than a bunch of balsa ribs and spars that you had to glue together to form the airframe. The real "art" was covering the entire thing in silkspan (a thin material similar to vellum paper) which came in sheets. You had to cut and fit it over and around the wings, tail and fuselage (without wrinkles) while applying coats of "dope", which causes the silkspan to shrink and harden. You also had to mount the engine and fuel tank, route the control lines, get all the flight surfaces working and balance the whole mess - the point being that it was a lot of work... (Painting it would have been pointless given the life expectancy so we just left it "raw".)

Yeah - I quickly became Juneau's "tech"... It's not that he couldn't do the work himself - it's just that patience wasn't his strong suit. (Quite the opposite, actually.) But I really enjoyed building things (thank you OCD) so I didn't mind...

Over time Juneau got good enough to fly with the "big boys", doing figure 8's, inside loops, outside loops, wing-overs - all kinds of stuff... It's hard to convey in words just how impressive it was to watch those guys fly. Those planes were incomprehensibly fast, and the maneuvers were crisp and instantaneous - it made me dizzy just watching. 
And the aerobatics were only part of the challenge. The "pilot" had to remember to sequence his stunts so if one loop twisted the control lines the next had to untwist them... And most importantly, he had to know when he was flying inverted because the slightest twitch of the control lines in the wrong direction would turn the plane into kindling. And that was Juneau's Achilles Heel - he was "inversion impaired"...
That's not to say he crashed every time he flew - but it happened often enough to where (over time) I lost enthusiasm for repairing the wadded up remnants. (I did get really good at it, though.)

Yeah - I guess this is another one of those posts that doesn't really have a point (other than highlighting the extent of my panic disorder when I was 10 years old) - it's just something that (for some reason or another) stands out in my memory..

 And it was nice to reflect on some of the good times that Juneau and I had when we weren't busy getting on each other's last nerve :-)