HHAMS Club Pilot, Bobby Alessi, “Puts You In The Driver’s Seat!”
You may remember the catchy Hertz rental car commercials from the 1960s with the famous line: “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat!” Well, HHAMS Club and AMA member Bobby Alessi is doing something very similar—only this time, it’s for the skies.
At his Port Washington, New York,-based club, Bobby doesn’t just help fellow members fly model aircraft—he puts them in the cockpit. Literally.
Unlike the standard-scale pilot busts you can buy off the shelf, Bobby’s creations are next-level. His pilot busts are so strikingly lifelike that, at a glance, many mistake them for actual photos of real club members. Bobby has a remarkable talent for miniaturizing his fellow pilots with such realism that viewers don’t say, “That looks like John Smith,”—they say, “That IS John Smith!”
So, how does this creative magic happen?
Bobby: "I use the Creality Ferret Pro handheld Scanner to scan the heads of my subjects. It only takes about 2-3 minutes to scan someone. The scanner actually takes precise measurements. Then I export the scan into the Creality Scanner program, which meshes the data so I can then export the file as an STL file, which can be read and sliced in Cura or Prusa slicing programs. It is then exported as a G-Code for the 3D printer. I need to figure out the correct scale for the plane or cockpit the figure is going into. I then paint the pilot to resemble as close to the subject as possible. It sounds complicated, but it really is not. Pictured is a group photo of my fellow pilots that I have scanned and reproduced in different scales. I enjoy seeing people’s faces when they realize it’s us in the cockpit! Some refer to it as my shrunken head collection. I thank my fellow club members for indulging me in this interesting project.
Bobby Alessi
I’m honored to be a 2024 Carl & Beth Goldberg award recipient.
