Hay Mister Will It Fly

Were you ever the kid who asked, “Hey Mister, will it fly?” The chances are pretty good that you were. People everywhere, if you ask them in just the right way, will admit that yes, they build model airplanes, or they used to, or they know someone who does, or they wish now they’d dared to try. Most of the good things that have come to me in life happened because of model airplanes. Ever since I first saw one fly, a wide eyed kid at the edge of a pasture, there has been a little of their influence in everything I do.

These days just about everybody knows about those pre-built or all-foam Almost-Ready-to-Fly models. Most of them fly really well, and there are plenty of experts around who will assure you that ARF’s are the only way to do model airplanes. Because my airplanes are so different from most of those, just about every time I show up at a flying field with one of them I get asked the same question… “Why would you want to spend weeks, or months, or more, building a plane before you get to fly it?”

There are some very good reasons for doing just that, and I want to share some of them with you. Building a model airplane from parts you cut out yourself, or make from scratch…and making that model fly…is truly a big deal, a real accomplishment.  It takes a special kind of person to do that. It is neither quick nor easy, but it is intensely rewarding. You have to want to do it.

Imagine learning to play a sport like baseball with the built-in condition that whenever you throw the ball less than perfectly, it breaks…and you have to fix it yourself  before you get to try again. There are so many ways to screw it up that I won’t even bother trying to list them. I’ve been doing this for well over fifty years, and you can trust me when I tell you that I am still discovering new ways to do it better. Real model airplane building… aeromodelling…is as much about learning as it is about confessing to a sense of wonder at making something with your own hands that will ride the air and then come safely back to earth. I have learned a lot about that, too, and spent more time than I’d like to account for wondering what I ought to do about it. In the end the answer was easy…I had to write a book about all those experiences. The result was Hey Mister, Will It Fly?