A safe haven is hard to find when the sky is aswarm with 200-mile-per-hour projectiles piloted from afar by fatalists who hold that, sooner or later, ”the ground gods must be appeased.”
This particular patch of ground at the National Model Airplane Championships seemed safe enough.
It was on the crowd`s side of the 20-foot-high safety nets surrounding a space in which miniature jet fighters were whipped on control lines at miniature Mach speeds over the heads of determined competitors with both arms hyper-extended.
Ten yards away, more competitors were tuning their planes by running the propellers at Cuisinart-level speeds. The pattern seemed to be for the blades to be held in alarmingly close proximity to vital body parts.
To an observer, standing behind the nets seemed a reasonably safe position at an event that rivaled TV`s ”Soul Train” for repeated incidence of full-body flinching.
Then came the alarm.
”Wires! Wires!”
The observer froze, fearful he had already set off a booby trap that would leave him dismembered and whimpering on the airport tarmac.
Dozens of fingers pointed to the asphalt around his feet, calling to his attention fine strands of trip wires stretched out across what had previously appeared to be clear ground.
They were not trip wires, however. They were high-tech solid wire, six-thousandths of an inch in diameter-control lines for model planes that belong to men and women who take kinks very seriously.
”If someone steps on them, they can get a kink that weakens them,”
explained Robert Whitney of Coral Springs, Fla., a test technician of Toro lawn mowers by occupation, a model plane pilot by avocation.
”You don`t want to break a line at 200 miles per hour. It happened in California a while back, and a plane shattered a guy`s leg.”
Before he could elaborate, the cry went up again: ”Wires! Wires!”
A woman driving a sanitation tanker truck stopped it just short. On a mission to relieve a nearby Porta-Potty, she had nearly crossed the lines into model-airplane Armageddon.
”This is the pits, Ma`am!” came the territorial warning.
She put the truck in reverse and backed off. The chastened observer followed her retreat.
Nearly 2,000 model airplane pilots and their pocket rockets competed in the skies over southeastern Illinois and neighboring Indiana last week at what is commonly known as ”the Nats.”
Perhaps five times that many spectators came, craned, and went home stiff-necked by the time the annual event geared down late Sunday.
Like flies at a confectionery convention, the scale-model planes picnicked on the peace and quiet that normally characterizes the Mid-America Airport, a former military airfield outside Lawrenceville, and on several sites in nearby St. Francisville, Ill., and Vincennes, Ind.
The microchip age
Once a hobby for kids who couldn`t hit a slow curve, model airplaning has met the microchip. Like the former computer nerds who now head billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies, model-plane hobbyists are flying proud and loud these days.
The Academy of Model Aeronautics still lists such unlikely folks as actors Robert Carradine (”Revenge of the Nerds”) and Jamie Farr
(”M+A+S+H”) among its 200,000 members, but astronauts Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman and Robert ”Hoot” Gibson, and jocks Buck Williams and Robin Yount are paraded out too.
Some aspects of competition, such as radio-controlled gliders and rubber- band duration fliers, still call to mind serene but unathletic visions of slipping ”the surly bonds of Earth,” and images of dancing ”the skies on laughter-silvered wings” (as one article declared in the academy`s press packet).
But other events called for participants and observers to bring their own flak jackets.
Behind a stand of tall trees at the edges of the convention`s airport playground was the war zone of aero-modeling: control-line combat flying.
It is in this arena that the ground gods get theirs.
In this league there is no flying around in circles trying to beat the clock, or any of that artsy aerial ballet hoo-doo with points awarded for the loft in your loop.
These pilots are out for blood. Or, more accurately, they snip, chew and clip wings with their combat planes in the air, while shoving, kicking, biting, gouging and body-slamming each other on the ground.
At first, control-line combat fliers pretend to portray their sport as a gentlemanly one. Aerial fencing, if you will.
”You get mad, but there`s nothing you can do about it after it`s all said and done,” said combat pilot Don Cranfill of Houston, who, when all is said and done, is just too good with a forearm to be convincing with this gentleman`s sport line.
”I like to keep my competitor behind me,” he explained. ”One guy wearing a helmet and a big ol` beard got behind me one time and wrapped an arm around my neck and I couldn`t breathe.”
Model dog fights
This form of model-airplane competition features two contestants standing in the center of a large circle in a treeless field. Their nitro-fueled
(actually, a little motor oil, a little alcohol and a double shot of nitromethane) planes are affixed with streamers on their tails, then fired up and turned on each other like fighting sky-roosters.
The high-powered planes are capable of speeds up to 125 m.p.h., depending on whether the competition is for slow or fast combat. The whirling propellers are capable of lopping off a digit without the slightest loss in r.p.m.s.
The idea is to cut the ribbon on the tail of your competitor`s plane with your propeller or with any other plane part that will do the job. Cutting an opponent`s control line is considered bad form, although it doesn`t stop pilots from doing it.
When a plane`s control line is cut, it careens out of control with little regard for the welfare of spectators below. Control-line combat pilots carry spare parts, tourniquets and war stories around by the Ford Econoline Van-ful. ”There are horror stories,” said Gordy Guerine, who recently won a Canadian championship and is a member of the bare-knuckles Chicagoland Circlecutters control-line combat corps.
”Sometimes the planes get cut loose and fly off,” added one of Guerine`s co-pilots. ”Everybody in the sport has been bit or chased by his own plane at one time or another.”
In a recent competition, according to Guerine, an absent-minded pilot started his model plane and handed it to his inattentive wife, who shortly found herself in a hospital emergency room being reattached to her finger.
In the frenetic arena of their sport, almost anything can happen, Guerine and his cronies said. ”In Rockford, a while back, a model combat airplane got loose and got caught in some power lines and it browned out the whole city for a while,” Guerine said.
The real combat often takes place on the ground between control line pilots who must stand close to each other to keep their planes in fighting position.
The aggressiveness of this pit-plane sport is reflected in the fact that the judge who stands in the circle with the competitors serves much the same purpose as a referee at a heavyweight boxing match. Known as the circle marshal, he tries to keep peace when he is not diving to the ground to avoid being shredded by a plummeting model plane.
”Guys will bite you if you get an arm in their face,” said Guerine, who perhaps coincidentally was wearing a heavy bandage on his forearm.
”We try not to fight dirty,” he said. ”Especially when competing within our own club. But in the national competitions, sometimes guys get dirty.”
Circlecutter member Janet Van Dyck of Glen Ellyn is one of the few women to compete in combat fighting, and the advantage is often hers, she said.
”The guys are afraid to hit or bump me in the circle,” she said. ”The adrenaline rush I get from this is amazing.”
Backing up Van Dyck and the rest of the Chicagoland Circlecutters in case of down-to-earth combat is the club`s enforcer, Wally Krueger, a carpenter from Maywood.
When he has a foe`s tail in his sights, Krueger has been known to sing Led Zeppelin tunes in his opponents` ears. He is notorious for his treatment of radio-control model pilots, who are regarded as lace-collared elitists by the control-line combat crowd.
On one Chicago practice field, Krueger became legend when a space-hog radio-control enthusiast mistakenly crashed his plane at Krueger`s feet. That legend has it that Krueger artfully kicked the R-C man`s thousand-dollar plane to pieces while holding him at bay with his strafing combat plane.
Krueger`s fame was further enhanced within his own sport not long ago when Krueger, exasperated by a particularly dirty opponent, assisted him in momentarily slipping the surly bonds of Earth.
”He was flying dirty and he was trying to cut my line, so I picked him up and threw him 20 feet,” Krueger said.
”The crowd liked it so much, I got a standing ovation.”
The ground gods, too, seemed appeased, he said.
