I had the P-51 Mustang one in the late 80s. At the time I wanted to be a pilot and was busily building balsa models, windup flying models, plastic Testors mode

I had the P-51 Mustang one in the late 80s. At the time I wanted to be a pilot and was busily building balsa models, windup flying models, plastic Testors models, and Estes rockets. The thing with the Cox airplanes was they were cheap enough for your parents to actually buy one. RC stuff used to be really expensive and clunky. My first RC plane was in the late 2000s and it was about 5 foot wingspan and had an even bigger, even messier glow-plug engine like the Cox flyers. I had to join a club to go fly it cause the radio equipment was still kind of sketchy. Total cost once all the accessories to fly it were included was probably closer to $1000 and even though it was "Ready to Fly" it still probably took 10 hours of work to get it actually flying well. (By that point the models were starting to be partially assembled in China) If it cost near $1000 in the late 2000s with it being partially assembled in China you weren't getting much in the 70s or 80s at an affordable price with it assembled in the US, so anything good meant many hours of you assembling it. Hence the Cox type stuff that was a couple pieces of cheap plastic. I crashed mine for sure, but never that badly. It was pretty good fun and I used it for a good period, though never without supervision. I never managed to learn any tricks, but I remember seeing an adult at the school fields one day who had one and was very good and did all kinds of tricks. I have a DJI drone.. it's amazing.. but is it actually as fun as that old stuff that took 10x-100x more work to get it to work? No, I don't think so, for me it's so easy it's kind of boring, though a good portion of that is that it's a quadcopter. Fixed wing is so much more fun to fly.