FLYING ADVENTURES
Part2
A couple of years after I entered my second childhood I was getting pretty good at building, flying and crashing RC airplanes. Sometimes it takes several weeks to build one of those things, but only a few minutes to turn one into dust. Crashing a plane is real easy to do! (Just ask Tropical Tramp!)
One day I was flying my latest super stunt plane upside down about three feet over the runway when a friend walked up and said, �What you doing?� I said �What you think I�m doing?� and pulled back on the remote control stick to make the fool airplane go up.
But the airplane went straight down into the concrete runway going about 90 miles per hour! If you are right side up like normal people fly one, you pull your stick back to go up, but if you are upside down the result is a real good airplane smashed into little bitty pieces!
Then I decided that flying a sailplane, or glider, was more my speed. Also you could get a sailplane way up in the sky and lie down on your back and just watch that sucker sail around. Being sorta lazy, that did appeal to me!
My first sailplane had about a four foot wingspan and had a little bitty motor to get it up into the air. I would go to a place nearby called Flagpole Hill, launch the plane and then fly it over a shopping center to get thermals (hot air) coming up from the concrete. This worked real good for a long time, but one day something went haywire and the plane just flew on down toward Mexico and I never saw it again.
So I decided I needed a larger sailplane that wouldn�t get lost so easy and built one with a ten foot wingspan. By this time my wife was sure I had lost my mind because she asked me if I was planning on flying IN that thing! Well, this did give me the idea that maybe I should build a real one, but I decided that because of my experience with crashing planes, it might not be a good idea to get IN one of them.
Anyhow, I flew that big sailplane several successfully many times. Then one day when I had that sucker so high up I could barely see it, a strong wind came up. In trying to get it back down on the ground in a hurry I landed it on a soccer field. Right in the middle of a soccer game! Those kids forgot all about kicking their soccer ball and had a great time kicking my poor sailplane all to pieces.
Then I decided to build me a radio controlled sailboat. After several weeks I had me a brand new sailboat and went down to White Rock Lake. I put it in the water and it took off just like it knew what it was supposed to do. Well, by now you might not be surprised at what happened, but that boat went right out in the middle of the lake and disappeared!
I then took up Basket Weaving!
| 
