With all the politics, religious and other sorted social media fights going on I have since left Facebook and other such sites and the time I gave gained is substantial. It’s important to work on things you do have control over. Things that bring you joy and peace because in doing them you do affect the world for the better.
As you know I love my model airplane hobby. I was chastised in FaceBook renetly for considering my hobby so important in light of the politics, the Me Too movement, and other world problems that are at the forefront of our attention. That was the last straw.
But the Hobby is important and I never felt it was more important than world issues but still very important. I never said those other issues weren’t important.
The article I posted here a few weeks ago says it all. Without model aviation we would have never gone to the moon or had flight at all. So much technology you use everyday you are totally unaware came from model aviation.
All those helicopters that drop fire retardant and evac critical patients to hospitals save lives and pottery. They all started with a young persons fascination with flight. It would be a pretty boring world without flight and space exploration and you owe it all to model aviation.
Ask Burt Rutan. He’ll tell you and if you don’t know who he is look him up.
I won’t go on because by now I hope you get the point. We need model aviation to go on so that young people will continue to have that dream of flight that leads to our pilots that fly our jets, our astronauts, our fighter pilots, engineers that invent the next breakthrough in aerospace and beyond. That Star Trek future all started with a young human being and a model that captured his or her dreams. We all benefited from it. They are trying right now to bring us that future we all need so very badly.
So the next time they want to turn a local model airplane field into another soccer field, think again. Go to the town hall meeting and tell them why model aviation is so important. We are slowly losing this hobby.
So with that I show you my latest efforts to keep flying. The big 94 inch wingspan Sinbad, (a design from the 1940’s when it was a free flight plane) is finally getting its wings covered and eventually the fuselage. Another week and it will be done and flying. This plane back in the 40s launched a zillion careers in aviation. It’s a important part of history and they still fly.
I’ve also been prepping some of my other gliders for a air show to honor Tony Naccarato I flew at yesterday. Tony is one of the greatest pilots and teachers of flight I have ever seen. He recently was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So the Valley Flyers had a special event and a day of flying for him. I’ll post video and pictures in an upcoming post soon.
His greatest concern of all was that he would no longer be able to teach people how to fly anymore. Since his diagnosis he has continued to teach at the airfield and work at the hobby store. Not for the money but just to help people and keep the hobby alive. That’s how important this hobby is. It’s more than a hobby. Much more.
