I hate to be the amateur psychologist, but somehow I guess that flying is serious business for you. Otherwise, how to explain the degree of emotion shown in this post?

For me, flying is recreation, also known as fun. Indestructible planes are just fun to fly.

I started out with a balsa trainer (a GP Trainer 40), a Bridi design you'd probably approve of. Every time I had a hard landing, or messed up right from left, I was looking at an hour or two of repairs. You might think that would have inspired me to fly better, but I was honestly doing the best I could. To me it was NO FUN. So I got a U.S. Aircore, and had a ball learning to fly. Instead of white-knuckling it, I was laughing with delight.

On the day I soloed at training day at my field, I got shot down, hard. The instructor who was with the student who turned on his transmitter came over and apologized and would have paid for the plane. Now how much fun would that have been with a balsa model? Some newbie makes an innocent mistake, and I have to either eat the cost myself, or ask him for it. With the Aircore, there was less than 1/2 hour of work to get it flying again (that was a severe crash!). That was 100 times more fun than the balsa alternative where someone goes home pretty grumpy.

Now that I had soloed, I wanted to learn to fly aerobatics, particularly inverted low passes. I asked the best flyer at the field how long it would take to get that good, and he said, "Four airplanes." That's when I was glad I was getting into Spads. Four wood airplanes would take a long time to build or a lot of money to buy! Don't get me wrong, I like building, but it's usually a winter activity, and I usually build just one plane a year. Besides, it just didn't seem like fun.

So I built 4 DPS Spads in a couple of weeks for about $50 (total), and my friends and I all had a ball flying them. It's not just the flying and not worrying about crashing. The "S" stands for "simple". On these planes, everything is exposed and reduced to the simplest to get the job done. You don't have to worry about a fuel leak in a closed compartment, or a push-rod binding inside a fuse, or fuel-soaked balsa, or how to route the throttle cable. Everything is just easy and therefore fun.

So what is it you detest about this story? That someone's having gain without the pain? I mean, I could understand if you said something like, "I'm not in to Spads, myself", just like I might say, "I'm not into scale". But to call them "abortions", and to draw up enough emotion to "detest" something sounds like something pretty deep.

I'm glad RCU is here to allow you to vent, but I'm also concerned that folks reading your post will pay attention, and thus miss out on what could be the most fun they'll ever have in R/C.