Hey, forestroke, I know what you mean about the long days. I have just recently been brought down to under a 50 hour week myself, but in the near future we have a threat to go back to normal.

I wasn't attacking RTFs or ARFs. I have several, some of them quality construction and good flyers. I wasn't even saying anything about some of the bad construction I've seen. ARFs/RTCs aren't that new. The first ARF I got was a plastic Wen-Mac American-made CL plane about 1949, and there were some available towards the end of WW2.

Point I was trying to make is the declining quality of some of the information available out there. Many of the so-called scale planes don't even resemble their namesakes. They don't qualify as Stand-Off or Sport Scale. They aren't that close. Some of them at best could be considered Caricature Scale. When editors can't even do correct identifications, that brings to mind some of the (instant results oriented) management decisions to ignore problems in my company that have caused some serious conflicts with customers.

Of course, over the years, I've frequently been disturbed by reviews where the reviewer talks about every step of construction of a kit or assembly of an ARF, then takes the finished product out to the field, has a ball with a badly tail heavy plane because he didn't bother to check the balance. Like we say in our Engineering department, we never have the time to do it right the first time, but we can sure take the time to correct it later.