In Virginia: Winging It for the Fun of It

By Hugh Sidey

"Top Gun" grooved his Viper jet through a long, graceful arc in the late summer sky, his forefinger and thumb caressing the plane's stick as if it were a violin. The aircraft's needle nose pointed toward the runway below at the U.S. Navy's Fentress Air Field near Norfolk, Va. Engine open and screaming, gulping in the thick air, the Viper reached max speed of 264 ft. per sec. 20 ft. above the concrete and leveled out for its pass. A faint touch of aileron and the ship rolled on its back. The crowd gasped. Heads swung in unison as the jet knifed by, turned upright and spiraled vertically into the sun, which splintered its bright beams on the wings. As Top Gun slid his plane to a landing 30 ft. in front of the stands, the crowd applauded lustily.

Eric Baugher, 29, of Bowie, Md., is Top Gun, chiefly because his toolbox decal jauntily proclaims him so. Throughout the Viper's stunning aerobatics, Baugher stood rooted to the tarmac manipulating a tiny radio that controlled the sleek, alcohol-powered jet, which has a 4-ft. wingspan and a 5-ft.-long fuselage. Baugher was one of 1,139 model-airplane fanatics who trundled 7,000 tiny planes into the Norfolk area to compete in the National Model Airplane Championships. Known widely as the Nats, the show is the largest, most diverse gathering of its kind on the globe. For nine days these earthbound pilots flew, gabbed, crashed, repaired and lived body and soul in the environment of a hobby-sport that has leaped the Iron Curtain, taken root in China and become one of the fastest-growing leisure indulgences in the free world. The Academy of Model Aeronautics' membership is expanding by 10% a year. The Hobby Industry Association estimates that perhaps 8 million Americans dabble at model-plane building and flying at one time or another in any year.

The Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh had their passion for flying ignited by successful model planes. Astronaut John Glenn bought 10 cents Comet kits more than a half-century ago, and the flimsy model planes he built launched him into space. Baugher, too, has a real-life side to his hobby: he is one of the few professional flyers of radio-controlled small aircraft. Baugher works for the AAI Corp., which does high-tech, often secret work on drones, those unmanned aircraft that may someday patrol the skies guided by electronics from distant command posts. Pursued in his off-hours, his hobby is part of an industry that is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and has benefited from advances in miniaturized electronics, motors and light, high- strength materials spawned in the race to the moon. "I like pushing the edge in flight and technology," says Baugher, a chip off Jimmy Doolittle, "and I can walk away from my crashes."

There was romance, too, on the broad, open fields of Virginia. The story of flight was re-enacted with models -- correct down to the fabric, wires and rivets -- of those old, often ungainly aircraft that took the first pioneers aloft. Larry Kruse, a dean of Seward County Community College in Liberal, Kans., launched his replica of a 1911 Voisin into the fitful afternoon breezes. An almost perfect twelve grams of craftsmanship with a 13-in. wingspan, the plane is powered by a rubber-band motor turned 2,300 times. The Voisin bucked and churned, its tiny pusher propeller sending it 125 ft. high, its miniature control flaps guiding it across the field for 67 sec., one of three flights that made it second in its class at the Nats.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington has been a godsend to the modelers who search for authenticity. Before the Smithsonian developed its library filled with plans, statistics and helpful researchers, hobbyists had to dig for the data themselves. That often proved difficult. Between the Wright brothers' first flight and World War II, literally thousands of planes were designed and built in small shops and barns, only to plunge into obscurity nearly as fast as they were launched. Scale modelers are especially eager to resurrect these relics.

That is why Kruse packed his three tiny planes on plastic foam bubbles in the back of his car and drove more than 1,300 miles across the U.S. to launch them for a few minutes of glory. For Kruse the urge is visceral, planted in him for good when, at age seven or eight, he hand-launched a 5 cents glider on ; the sun-drenched Kansas prairie. The craft rose a few feet, then miraculously was snatched by a thermal and carried away. Kruse leaped on his bicycle and rode desperately after it -- one mile, two miles, five miles. He came home stunned. "How'd it go?" his dad asked. "It flew five miles," said young Kruse. "That's crazy," the father declared. "Where'd you launch it, where'd it land?" Kruse told him. The father fell silent, stared at the youngster, then responded in awed tones, "That's five miles." Kruse has tutored so many Kansas kids in the fine art of modeling that he has lost count. He now writes a column for Flying Models, a leading journal for enthusiasts.

Is model-airplane building and flying a hobby or a sport? That is a chicken- and-egg question endlessly debated by zealous practitioners and uncomprehending outsiders. There is little question in the mind of Chip Hyde, 16, of Yuma, Ariz. Three times he has been champion of the open class of radio-controlled aerobatic flying. That means he has beaten all comers with his skill and his pink-and-blue Conquest, driven by an alcohol-fueled engine the size of a human fist. He must practice continuously to keep up his skill, sometimes four days a week for an hour or two each session. His prowess has won him trips to a competition in France, where he placed sixth, and to China, where he won a second prize. For Hyde, model-airplane competition is an athletic pursuit every bit as exacting as, say, golf or riflery.

Old-timers talk of the superb eye-hand coordination required of a successful model radio-control operator in pylon racing, in which the modelers match speed over a pylon-marked course, or air combat, where they dogfight by cutting paper streamers with their propellers. Another essential skill is cockpit orientation. The pilot on the ground must imagine himself aloft, looking through the windshield of his plane no matter how many complex maneuvers he goes through. If the pilot loses mental orientation, he can send the plane in the opposite direction from what he intends, a consequence that has driven many a novice back to golf or riflery.

Successful modelers know that what comes up must come down, sometimes hard. A crash of one of the bigger-scale models these days can leave a $2,000 hole in the ground. Still, the aficionados keep coming. There were 76 events at Fentress this summer, including competitions for featherweight indoor models with a filmy covering that can fly almost an hour like a wandering butterfly, and gliders that can stay up all day with their 10-ft. wingspans. Power sources include wind, rubber, CO2, electricity, alcohol and gasoline. Multichannel radios allow the operators of the larger models to start motors by remote control, steer nose wheels, retract landing gear, drop dummy bombs and take aerial photos in addition to controlling the rudder, elevator and ailerons. An entire field at the N.A.T.S. was set aside for 90 model helicopters, each having 1,000 or so moving parts and capable of flying upside down, a maneuver not dared by the real ships.

Given that the whole of aircraft history has now been recreated in miniature, it was only a matter of time until one wonderfully colorful institution from the old days would be revived: barnstorming. John Pagan, a high school teacher from Beaumont, Texas, roams the country with his 7-ft. model of an open-cockpit Fleet biplane. For a few bucks he will rev up the five-cylinder radial engine, put a duplicate control stick in the hands of a student and teach him or her how to coax the plane around the summer skies. Business has been so good that Pagan plans to barnstorm full-time when he retires from teaching in a few years. Waldo Pepper never had it so good.