Growing up in a family of all boys exposes you to a lot of macho pursuits. There was always something going on at the Zerr house, from slot car races to a real stock car that had a tendency to burst into flames unexpectedly whenever my brother took it for a test drive up and down the road. Add in some snakes, gallons of gas, magnifying glasses, unicycles and stilts and you had heaven on earth for any boy growing up in post-war America.
Me, I had my own interests, ones I didn’t really share with my brothers. Odd man out I guess, going with the beat of a different drummer, black sheep of the family, you can fill in the blank here.
But I did love model airplanes. My oldest brother was really into flying planes. This was back in the day before radio controls. These were line driven planes. You held onto a handle with two lines that ran out to the airplane. Pull up on the handle and the plane would gain altitude. Push down and the plane would dive.
You stood in the center. The plane went around you in a circle. If you were good, you could do all sorts of acrobatics with the plane, which was made of balsa wood and covered with paper or silk. My brother had some demonically fast and agile planes. He won all sorts of trophies and I wanted so much to be like him.
I eventually decided it was time for me to learn to fly. My father and I would go down to Kennydale park and use the ball field there. The pitcher’s mound was the perfect place for me to earn my wings.
My dad would fuel up the plane and after endless attempts, the .049 engine would finally come to life. As with all kids back then, the plane of choice was a PT-19 trainer.
Here’s the plane I was learning to fly. No, it’s not broken. It’s built this way. Rubber bands hold it all together.
There’s a simple reason for this. The Cox folks who designed it knew that it was going to crash – a lot! Time and time again it will fall out of the sky, often in the worst way possible. Rather than break into a million pieces, the rubber bands would simply pop off. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, we could put the PT-19 back together again.
I certainly experienced the joy of crashing horrifically several times that day. It took a lot of finesse to get the PT-19 into the air. This was for two reasons. First, it was really tough to remember which way to move the control handle. You had to actually point it down to get it to go up on take off, otherwise the tail wouldn’t lift. Second, it was horribly underpowered. The engine barely had enough oomph to it to get the plane into the air.
Eventually I got the hang of it and could fly around and around pretty well. I could even land it, well at least when it didn’t run out of gas and just crash. Eventually, my father was too ill to take me flying. So I got it into my thick “guy head” that I should try to do it myself.
I would position the control handle at the pitcher’s mound, then walk back to the plane to start the engine. I’d connect the battery, give the prop a couple spins and when the engine suddenly sprang to life, I would adjust the choke so it was running full bore and then run for my life to the control out on the mound. The plane would lumber along toward first base and I would grab the control and bring it around to second.
A time or two I didn’t run fast enough. No surprise there. I was never that fast. This wasn’t really a problem, unless the plane hit a pebble on the “runway.” Then it would jerk left and head towards me. I was now being chased down by my own plane. It seemed to anticipate my every move. I finally just gave up and let it continue on to center field where it mowed the grass a bit, until a patch of grass lodged in the prop, stopping the motor.
I was undeterred. I patiently removed all the grass, pulled out the last two rubber bands I had and patched the PT-19 back up. I took it back to home plate, and restarted the engine. This time I did a dead run to the mound and made it with moments to spare. I eased the plane into the air. A perfect do-it-yourself takeoff.
The only problem with flying these planes was that it got pretty boring. You could only go around in a circle. There was no flying it off in the distance and having it return like you can with radio control. You just spun around and around, waiting for the engine to run out of gas. Sure, you could go up and down, but that was pretty much it.
Cox bragged in their operating instructions that it would do stunts. I tried it once. Supposedly, you could put the plane into a shallow dive to gain speed and then pull back on the control handle full. The plane would then go up and over you, ending up on the other side.
The plane went down, gained speed, then up just like they said. And then it stalled precariously, right over my head. I didn’t have to wait to find out what it would do next. It headed down. Straight down. Down to where I was standing. Again, I ran for my life.
The plane hit the ground. No amount of rubber bands was going to patch it on this day.
And so my life of flying ended right there and then. I guess that’s a good thing. I doubt I would have been a very good pilot. And I can only imagine how big the rubber bands would have to be to keep the wings of a 737 on.
In the Emerald City, totally out of control, as always,
– Robb