I soon joined a
"club" of boys who where also starting this hobby. This photo shows Antonio,
ready to start the engine on his plane. Note the telephone battery at the
right edge of the photo. It was used to heat the glow plug. I had to learn
all those things first! The instructions for my engine came in English,
and I had not yet learned this language... It was up to another new friend,
whom I knew by his handle "Coco" much before knowing that he had a real
name too, to teach me the basics about the handling of these glow plug
engines. But then I quickly became a fanatic flier!
We flew exclusively U-control planes like the one in the photo. These fly in circles around the pilot, who has to keep rotating all the time while controlling the plane's elevator through a double string, visible above the left wing in this photo. When the plane was fast, and the string short, one became awfully sick from the fast rotation! I remember more than one pilot crashing his plane, green-faced, unable to keep upright!
I built a total of about 15 U-control planes. They were fast and cheap to make. Either I used one plank of Balsa wood, cut up to make the wing and fuselage, with a small piece of another one for the tail, or I made the planes from cardboard structure. That was cheaper, but heavier. Unfortunately I have very few photos of my planes of that time, and they are quite unsharp (fixed lens camera!). So I will keep them out of this web page, and rather just let you know that I flew U-control planes for about 4 years, until it became too boring. My friends had all moved to radio-control, but I had no money for that. I bugged my parents a lot for a radio control set, but it just wasn't possible. So I went out to the flying fields with my friends, doing mechanic's work and begging airtime from them. I learned to fly radio controlled planes that way...
In my extensive
photo archive I found just one nicely documented story from my school time
about this RC flying adventures. Here you can make the acquaintance of
my classmate Eduardo. He was strongly into gliders. They make no noise
(so other people won't complain), need no fuel (students never have much
spare money!), there is no engine that could refuse to start (so common
with these little critters!), and a glider just looks so elegant in the
air!
The landscape was
idyllic, and ideally suited for flying a glider. We were visiting at another
classmate's parent's farm, and they had such a nice hill, with a soft and
smooth wind coming straight up. Eduardo launched his plane, and started
ridge-soaring. After a while he handed me the radio. I flew a while, then
gave the radio on to another guy. We flew a long time. The weather was
nice, the plane flew well, its large dihedral making it easy to control,
and in gliders there is no fuel tank to become empty... Just the radio
batteries may run down, but they last for several hours. So we flew, and
flew...
So I won't make
you wait any longer! The funny thing is that it was Eduardo himself who
misjudged the distance, and flew his very own plane into the only tree
within reach! It was hard to say if he was more pissed off by the mishap,
or more worried for possible damage in his nice plane. "How could I..."
he kept saying. There was no use in blaming the radio, a wind gust, or...
well, blaming the tree for having been in the plane's path. And there was
no way around the need to climb the tree to retrieve the plane!
It was not easy.
Eduardo, as the culprit, owner, and most concerned of all, climbed to the
top. After finding it impossible to remove the plane from the tree without
further damage, he decided to disassemble it right there. Two others had
to climb halfway into the tree, and a chain was made to handle the parts
down.
The effort was crowned
by a full success. The only damage to the plane were some slight wounds
in the thin covering. The structure had survived unharmed. That evening
we provisionally fixed the plane, using self-adhesive tape, and the next
day we were out flying again - far away from the only tree!