The single-engine plane circled over some trees, then headed east toward the intersection of 107th Street and LaGrange Road. As the plane approached, it looked as though the pilot was losing control. Then the plane plummeted, crashing on the grass about 100 feet from the afternoon rush-hour traffic on LaGrange Road.
Luckily, the pilot wasn’t injured — he wasn’t even in the cockpit. John Russell was about 500 feet away from the wreckage, piloting his 5-foot-long model plane by radio control.
“I readjusted the plane and lost control, so I let it crash on the grass so it wouldn’t go into the traffic,” Russell explained a few minutes after his summer afternoon mishap. “It’s not a big deal. Crashes are part of the hobby.”
The hobby is radio-controlled model aviation. And, for the Model Aviation Academy (MAA), that hobby is more like a religion. Every Wednesday at 4 p.m., you can catch Russell and other members of this group near the 100-foot-long asphalt runway specifically installed for this club and two other groups that fly model airplanes at Morrill Meadow, a Cook County Forest Preserve District site near southwest suburban Palos Hills.
Founded in the early 1980s, the group has about 40 members, of which an average of 15 gather for these Wednesday flyarounds. There, they indulge in their passion for piloting a somewhat sophisticated aircraft, many of which they built from scratch. And they also get a chance to bond with others who share the same passion.
“I’m self-employed, so I need something to occupy my time,” said Russell, a club member who lives in Chicago. “And there’s nothing better than this. When you get your first plane up in the air on your own, it’s like your wife having a baby. As a matter of fact, I was probably more excited when I got my first (plane) off than when my wife had our first baby.”
Radio-controlled aviation is not an easy hobby, and it can be pricey. Money can be saved by building a plane from a kit, but by the time the motor and radio-control gear are added, the cost will top $300. More sophisticated planes can run into the thousands of dollars.
Expenses don’t end there. These radio-controlled planes need gas to get off the ground, and club members tell neophytes that they’ll have to invest in at least one backup plane because their first plane most likely will be destroyed in an accident.
“Most of the times there are landing problems. You may get confused on the control and have a hard landing, which means that you’ll have to buy a new plane,” said Dan Knocker of Elwood, president of the club. “It’s something that you buy and don’t tell the wife about.”
Club dues are $35 for the first year, and $30 thereafter. Membership in the national Academy of Model Aeronautics, a Muncie, Ind.-based organization that governs flying clubs, is $48. That group also provides liability insurance for those participating in the hobby.
National academy spokesman Gary Prather said there are about 2,500 chartered radio-controlled model aviation clubs, with about 150,000 members.
Flying these planes is a skill developed over time. Members start off by flying alongside an experienced member who has a “buddy box,” which is a dual-control radio. This way, the experienced member can take over if the rookie makes a mistake.
The radio control box is a small device about the size of a Walkman. The device is equipped with two joysticks. One stick controls left and right turns and up and down maneuvers, and the other stick controls the throttle and the rudder.
Club members limit their flying area to a radius of about 400 feet from the forest preserve strip.
“The radios have a range of roughly a mile, so we could fly farther,” said club treasurer Bob Quitter of Berwyn. “But we don’t fly them that far out. If you did, you couldn’t see it to control it.”
The process sounds simple, but beginners often confuse the joysticks, which can cause some problems. Additionally, the light planes have to contend with wind, which can seriously affect the experienced pilot as well as the beginner. Accidents are expected.
“The airplanes are so small, but they deal with the same elements as the bigger planes, so they tend to get bounced around more,” Quitter said. “It does involve intense concentration.”
Midair collisions also are commonplace, even for the most experienced pilot.
“We limit ourselves to five planes in the air, because of possible interference with the (radio) frequencies,” Knocker said.
“I’ve been flying for three years, and during that time I have crashed four or five times, and I’ve had about eight midair collisions,” added Dan Wagner, another club member. “It takes a long time to learn to fly with a comfort level. You get a dry throat, your hands shake, you’re nervous and terrified. There are just so many variables — the control, the wind. But later on it becomes enjoyable.”
Once they have more experience, pilots begin learning the basic aerobatic maneuvers, including the loop and the Immelman, which is named for a World War I German aviator. In the Immelman, the plane begins a loop, but as it reaches the top of the loop, where the plane is upside down, the plane levels off and rotates 180 degrees so it ends up upright and traveling the opposite direction from which it started.
The skilled pilots in the MAA waste no time in engaging their peers in informal competitions, with emphasis on informal.
“There are clubs that have competition, but here it’s competition at a very low level,” Quitter said. “We’ll judge each other’s moves, but that’s about as serious as it gets.”
Just as important as the flying is the camaraderie among club members. One reason for the bonding is that many of the club members are within the same 40-to-60 age group and fell in love with aviation at the same time.
“I was born in 1940 around Midway Airport,” Quitter said. “As a young child, to look up and hear the roar of those big motors from the World War II era, I just became fascinated with flight.”
Radio controlled planes were available then, and Quitter remembers wanting an early model, only to be driven off by the price.
“At that time, this was even more expensive as a hobby than it is today,” Quitter said. “So most kids couldn’t really afford to pursue this hobby. But with the miniaturization of the radio components today, actually the cost has come down and the engines are far more reliable.”
Club members believe younger people with their generally quicker reflexes might work better with these planes. The middle-aged, however, are more likely to have the money to afford the multiple planes, the gas and the other amenities needed.
“You don’t see a lot of younger children for the simple reason that they can’t drive, they don’t have the money and they generally need someone else to put the plane together,” said club member Martin Stanley of Bridgeview. “You don’t generally see younger children here unless the father is involved somehow.”
For the most part, club members have had previous experience working with either real airplanes or the radio control models. Word-of-mouth or the MAA’s brochures — ubiquitous in craft stores throughout the southern suburbs — attract new club members.
“I came out here about four years ago, after John Russell told me about the club,” recalled Dan Knocker. “I had prior experience with airplanes — I worked for Grumman Aircraft and Fairchild Recovery. But there are people in this club who’ve flown for close to 30 years.”
Even club members experienced with actual aircraft have trouble at first with the smaller models. But for beginners, the task can be daunting.
“It took me somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred flights or more before I was able to relax,” Quitter recalled. “Some people learn more quickly than others. I just talked to a guy, it took him 17 months. I’ve had somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 flights. But in the club, we’ve got some people who haven’t soloed yet and others who average 400 flights a year.”
Quitter and other members of the group say that they have to fly every week — even during the winter — to maintain their flying skills. The club and the Cook County Forest Preserve District allow flying even during the dog days of December, January and February.
Those cold weather flights have drawn mixed reviews.
“I remember one day it was 19 degrees out here, but there was no wind and it was sunny,” Quitter recalled. “It took us about two hours before we noticed the cold.”
But Wagner remembered the cold as being less than inviting. “I used to belong to a group known as the Polar Bears, and what you’d do is come out here on Jan. 1 and just fly,” Wagner recalled. “I was frozen solid. Never again will I fly on Jan. 1.”
The MAA operates the runway with the two other flying groups in the south suburbs — the Polar Bear Squadron and Palos R.C. Flying Club. These groups contribute to a pool for cutting the grass. This is done even though the Cook County Forest Preserve District also maintains the area.
“They keep the grass mowed to a reasonable level,” Quitter said. “But we have to maintain the grass in the area that we fly in. The grass has to be low enough for our takeoffs.”
Although the forest preserve is a public area, the flying groups have jurisdiction over land immediately around the runway during their flights.
“We do ask people not to bring kites out here,” Stanley said. “It’s just easy to tangle up with the planes. You get some people who think it’s a golf driving range. We’ve had confrontations with people. I’ll tell them nicely, this is for flying planes. If they don’t respond, I’ll call the forest preserve police.”
Though club members are protective of the area, they still welcome outsiders — or at least those outsiders who want to learn about their hobby.
“We’ll help anyone who comes out here and is willing to learn about flying,” Stanley said. “But at some point, we tell people that they have to join the club. It’s invaluable in terms of getting experience and developing friendships.”
The only bad thing about the sport, according to Stanley, is that not enough women come out to participate.
“It’s a predominantly male sport,” he said. “You can count the number of women on one hand.”
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For more information, call Bob Quitter at 708-788-4370.
