My Dad was the first in the family, along with my uncle, to embrace the love of flight! My Dad served in Korea, and after he left to come home, he had a stop over in Japan where he purchased two line control planes and then had them shipped over to the states. My uncle, who was a World War 2 veteran, would assist my Dad, not with flying them but with rebuilding them after he crashed them.
After a while, they got pretty good as a team with less crashes. I never seen him fly them, but he would take them out once and a while and start them, and thus the beginning of my love of airplanes began!
I started in 1980 with my first plane, a Sterling Fledgling, which a friend of mine built and I bought from him and installed a used 4-channel Kraft radio system in and a .35 glow engine. I got in it pretty heavy but did not learn to fly because of fearing to crash the plane! So, I sold everything at swap shops in '86.
But in mid 2013, when electric motors and batteries started to become popular and also computer flight simulators, I learned to fly and would practice flying park fliers at a local friend's farm. I then purchased planes that had landing gear and joined a local club, "The Flying Aces" in Aurora, Ohio.
And I have amassed a fleet of aircraft, helicopters, and drones, and quite a few rockets too! Things have changed so much in the last 40-plus years, foam planes, radios, gyros, flight simulators, etc. It's so much easier to learn to fly today then years ago! My suggestion to anyone now wanting to get into the hobby today is go for it, you have so much more going for you to learn to fly now then what we had years ago. Though the electronics today can be complicated, start with a plug and play kit or bind and fly and work your way up to the more complicated equipment. The sky is the limit!
Ken Davis
Mantua Ohio
Flying Aces of Aurora Club
