RC Aviators Looking Up

“It gets in your blood,” said Larry Barnes, one of the club’s founders. “You want to do all these things, and if anybody else does it, you want to do it also and do it better.”

Harold Parker, who Barnes said “was one of the best ones of all of us and a very important part of early flying in this area,” agreed with his assessment.

“Once I started doing it I became addicted to it; I got bit by a bug,” said Parker, who is 80. “I don’t know any other way to explain it. My draw is I wanted to get better. I wanted to beat the competition.”

“It wasn’t easy for me to learn,” Parker said. “I had a pretty difficult time learning; tore up a lot of equipment learning it. But I learned on my own. I didn’t have any instructor to help me out.”

Mike Morton is the club’s secretary/treasurer and editor of its newsletter. He called Parker “kind of the mentor of our club” because of his approximately 40 years of experience flying model planes.

“It’s a really good hobby if you enjoy aviation, or mechanical things and some people just like to build models,” Morton said. “It’s a really good senior (citizens) group activity; probably most of our membership are seniors.”

But he conceded they are often out-flown by the teenagers: “Most of them can fly better than I can.”

Nowadays people don’t have to crash planes to learn how to fly them. “I’ve taught a lot of young men to fly models so well that they got to where they decided they wanted to fly full-scale airplanes,” Barnes said. “The ones that learned by flying models first …it’s just remarkable how good they do.”

“There are several people who have gone on to full-scale aviation,” Morton confirmed. “Several of our club members are full-scale aviators.”

Barnes prides himself on teaching students so that “we’d get through with the same airplane we started with. That certainly isn’t the case usually.”

Barnes, 75, noted modern planes are easier to fly than the ones he began with. “They’re very much a teaching device. But it’s not an easy thing to do. They’ve definitely made it easier, but it’s not something you’re going to just go out and do without tearing up an airplane or two before you start.”

Dorin Luck was another pioneer of radio-controlled aircraft in this area, beginning in 1978. He also taught himself how to fly, although he is not active in the club these days.

Barnes and Parker are still active in the club, however.  “I hadn’t been in several years, and I was giving it up,” Barnes said, but someone asked him to go so he went to this year’s fly-in held Sept. 9-11.

Barnes said he and Parker “were really, really into it. We couldn’t get enough of flying.”

The club held its first fly-in 1990, according to three articles in The Gleaner in late September 1992, which said that year’s fly-in was the club’s third.

Barnes said the initial flying – and the first fly-in – was on land James McConathy allowed them to use on Airline Road. Parker said another site was also used before the club quickly settled on its current site at 4946 Robards-Busby Station Road.

The annual fly-in grew. “We had as many as 130 at one or two of those fly-ins,” Parker said. “Now we’re doing close to 70 on average.”

Morton said 69 pilots from seven states attended this year’s fly-in, from Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. The club membership area covers “everything from Pulaski, Tennessee, all the way up to Henderson and west to Dawson Springs. And we’ve got one boy in Patoka, Indiana.”

“It can be a bit of a pricey hobby, although there are opportunities for careers in it,” Morton said. “There are at least 12 universities in the U.S. right now offering degrees in remote-sensing techniques using aerial platforms like this.”

But he compared it to fishing, which can be done with a cane pole and a can of worms, or a big boat and pickup truck to haul it, he noted. Tina Zieman, the fly-in contest director, said beginners could spend “from $29 to wherever you want to stop.”

“The sky’s the limit from there,” Morton said. Prices for the top models at the fly-in “run in the neighborhood of $8,000 to $10,000; $300 is pretty much the ground floor” for competitors at fly-ins.

But for the die-hards, that’s not a consideration. Parker said he might be 80 years old “but I’m still interested in it. I don’t participate hardly as much as I used to, but I’ve still got as much desire for it as I ever did. I ain’t done yet.”