Having grown up around an airport, I spent many hours in my schoolboy days just watching real planes fly. It was not all that "exciting", not like watching or flying 3D, but it was fascinating enough, and still fascinates me to watch. 3D is great sport, no question about it. But flying a nicely done scale model in realistic scale-like flight takes a lot of skill and concentration. No wobbles, no over-correcting, no jittering all over the place, just going where you want to go like you were on rails, has a beauty all its own. Flying pattern is great discipline for learning those skills. Watching pattern, if you don't fly pattern, I will admit can get boring pretty fast. But flying pattern is about as intense for concentration as anything I can imagine. Plus the thought and care that goes into setting up, aligning and trimming, weight/strength economy, powerplant efficiency & reliabilty--so many details honed to a gnat's eyebrow in a competitive pattern ship, these all develop techniques that contribute to any category of modeling & flying.

I was at a scale meet this past weekend. My favorite maneuver to watch was the "simple" horizontal eight. Most entries flew their figures the way a four-year old makes his first letters with pencil and paper--jerky, wobbly, drifting off and abruptly correcting, no proportion to speak of. When the best pilots flew a nice round circle with consistent bank, constant speed and constant altitude, and came around to the same center they entered from, and then did the same on the other side, that was a pleasure to watch. We had a dazzling mid-day demo of big composite 3D ARFs, and that was spectacular flying. But I still looked forward to the afternoon rounds and more (occasionally) flawless maneuvers.