4 ms·
I find this division on "hobby" and "toys" very strange. I participated at local "airplane modelling club" at my 9-11 years and we had these control-line plane
by blacklion 4y ago
I find this division on "hobby" and "toys" very strange.
I participated at local "airplane modelling club" at my 9-11 years and we had these control-line planes with ICEs (hand-built from scratch). Only "glowing plug" ICEs were very high-end and rare in my country and we used compression (effectively 2 stroke diesel!) engines which required very specific fuel: 1/3 of kerosene, 1/3 of castor oil and 1/3 diethyl ether. Ether were hard to get by, but my grandmother was surgeon nurse ;-) And, yes, 9-year old flight these planes under supervision of club's instructor.
R/C planes were known, but electronics for them were available only in very big clubs ("Pioneers Palace", one per city in best case, if you live in big city).
- m4rtink 4y agoI have a very similar experience about a decade later in a follow-up organization to the SVAZARM/pioneer ones. By that point the control line planes were just hanging from the ceiling and detonation engines were on the way out with glow spark replacing them mostly. People also had general acces to multi channel RC and we had one vintage "communist era" single channel on/off RC set as a curiosity. :-)
- blacklion 4y agoI've fall into hole between rich state (when such clubs were comparably-well-funded) and rich parents and full shops (when it become possible to buy materials, engines, etc., for money of participants themselves), so our small local club has only 2 working carbureted compression ignition engines (it is named so in English according to Wikipedia) and one glow-plug engine, all other were cannibalized for parts...