We had a low flying news helicopter situation involving R/C that turned into a 2 part television news story, back about 1994 or so.

There was a well known local helicopter pilot/traffic and news reporter that thought it was his god given right to blast around at less than 500 feet anywhere along the major highways. Anyone remember Dick Siegel from that time frame in DFW? He would directly and repeatedly overfly the Greater Southwest R/C club field in east FW/Hurst (about 1/3-1/5 mile off of the loop around FW)and if he saw a model, he would claim, on the air, that those crazy model flyers were TRYING to hit him and that we were a major menace to air navigation! He and his assistant (actually, the REAL pilot) would take videos of models at about their level and air them with the news report. A ground based news team showed up at the model field and even enticed the flyers into flying higher than normal one day and used that report as part of the attack.

The local clubs, the AMA and the SFA all contacted the news station and told them the real story, including a number of full scale proffesional pilots that also flew models......and it all went away. I do beleive, but am not 100% positive that his low flying was reported to the FAA and he got in some amount of trouble over it. I am fairly certain that he had one or more license suspentions around ths time....

A good flying freind of mine had the ulimate encounter with this jerk, sometime a while before before the news reports. Jim was practicing turnaround aerobatics at the local Jr. college field, also on the loop around FW, on the south side. This same guy came zipping along at warp speed, right at Jim's altitude of about 100 feet or so and directly overhead Jim. Not sure if Jim had time to zig, but the heli zagged, whipped around and landed very close to Jim, right on the college property. The jerk gets out, runs over to Jim and starts screaming at him about Jim trying to kill him on purpose. Incredible. It is all Jim can do to keep his model from crashing while he is getting reamed. The guy is yelling at Jim to land, but he had landed the chopper on the mowed runway!

Then this guy gets back in the JetRanger and, no kidding, buzzes Jim on takeoff, at close range. Scared the crap out of him. Siegel should have done time for that stunt.

Jim lands, gets himself back together and refuels and takes off again.......about 5 minutes later, a police cruiser shows up and the officer asks Jim if he had beed trying to hit Dick Siegel with a model plane.......

Jim tells his side and how low the jerk was and the police officer sighed, asked Jim for a written report and then made a radio call to cancel the other two squad cars that were in route, and most likely planning to to arrest Jim....geeez.

The moral of the story is to stay alert, expect the unexpected and do your darnest to avoid full scale aircraft while flying models, at all costs, no matter who is in the right. Then, if the full scale pilot is in the wrong, turn his butt in.