RE: Let's meet the new guys!
Hello Mike, and everybody else in RCU world.
I am Dick, 58 years old, retired from the U.S. Coast Guard. Started RC once while stationed in northern CA but had to drop it because of the CG ship patrol schedule. Next assignment was NY City so flying there was out. After that, I just lost interest until about three years ago. I retired in 1997 and work for the FAA as a contractor on Air Traffic Control Secondary Radar Systems. Aviation has always been one of my interests.
One day, I was driving on a back road and heard a familiar noise, looked up and saw an RC plane. Boiiiiing... something flipped... I stopped, and talked to the people there. Next thing you know, I was off to the local hobby shop and then on mail order buying what I needed.
Well, again, work schedules and travel caused my training to decay then sort of stop for a short while. One of my trips was to Harlow England where one of the guys I was working with is an RC'er. So I ended up spending a lot of time with him and his club. I even went so far as to buy a plane over there and flew it a few times with the aid of an instructor.
Last April I noticed that the NexSTAR was out and liked it so much that I bought one. I talked to my flight instructor and we started burning fuel. I solo'ed in August and have burned about 5 gallons of fuel since then.
I now own: NexSTAR Select, Tiger 60 w Super Tiger 75, Ripmax Rapier flying wing w OS 50, Four Star 40 w OS46, Skylark 56 w OS 52 Surpass, Tiger II, and an Elder 40. The Tiger II is in the build stages, modifying it by lengthening the fuse, changing some of the ply to hard balsa, other mods to reduce wieght. Putting my great running OS 50 on board and going to start into Pattern with it. The Elder 40 will get my Evolution 46.
Dick Soucy