I agree with much of what has been said here. I've FINALLY gotten my third plane in the air
with the help of a local club and a very good instructor.

First plane:
Goldeberg Eagle 2, Fox 40, built it with ailerons.

Joined a local club in PA, wasn't easy... had to be recommended by another member and I really
didn't know anyone who was in the hobby. As luck would have it about the time I completed the Eagle 2 I had just bought a new-to-me car from a ad in the paper from a nice older gentleman and I noticed a RC plane hanging in his garage.

We ended up talking for about an hour and he understood my predicament, he had been a founding
member of a local club and although he didn't actively fly much anymore he still went to most of the
meetings and he offered to help me with my plane and sponsor me for membership.

Well the field was far enough away and I never did hook up with an instructor, but I happened to stop by
Valley Forge one day(conveniently while my plane was in the car) as I often did and lo and behold there was an instructor there from the VF Signal Seekers. He didn't have his buddy-box setup with him but if I wanted he offered to look over my plane and if it looked like it would fly he would be willing to take it up and try to get it trimmed. He did it flew and about five minutes into the flight it went deadstick, he made a beautiful landing and determined from questioning me that I probably didn't have the engine broken in properly yet and it probably got too lean and decided to overheat.

That week I moved about 25 miles away and the moving company managed to drop a box on the Eagle 2. It sat in the basement of the new house waiting for repair until one of sons managed to completely rekit it. We don't know which son, it was either "not me"... or "I dunno". Sold the radio, disassembled the gummed up Fox that I didn’t ‘after-lube and about a week later the same two kids were involved with the disappearance of many of the Fox 40 small bits from the workbench.

Fast forward one or three years.
While drooling in a hobby shop one day when I thought my wife wouldn’t mind, I succumbed to a Goldberg Mirage 550. Built it, hung it in the basement and hoped to get another radio someday when my
spouse wasn’t so preoccupied with non-essentials like food, mortgage, clothes for the kids… You know how it goes. Well it got some ‘hanger rash’ from ricochet BBs over the years…

Fast forward another year or so… I quielty slithered out of a hobby shop with a Great Planes PT40. Built most of it and again waited for the day when radios would be available. Another time I sneaked an OS 46FX home

Well I moved again, this time to Wisconsin, tried to hook up with one club via internet, but it turns out they never got my email. Took a trip to a somewhat local hobby shop, bought a radio and covertly got in to the basement. I heard the OS-FX likes to break off needle valves in a crash so I again covertly acted and got a used SuperTigre 40 from eBay (it really runs sweet too)

It finally all came together, this time instead of getting a club name from a hobby shop I got a person’s name and a phone number. I’ve met with the gentleman over the past few weeks and he’s put me to work with some of the field grooming and the PT40 has flown six times now and it hasn’t augured in yet. (I know it will sooner or later). Twelve or thirteen years or so into the hobby, and I’m finally airborne.

This time I’m at least for now (and hopefully not too much longer) unemployed. This time I got a name and number instead of a flyer or a “I think they meet on the sixth Tuesday of every other month”. It’s just that things are tougher in some respects. When I was growing up I was loose on my bicycle or hitchhiked. These days the rug-rats need to be ferried everywhere. Baseball, soccer, basketball or whatever. Businesses optimize for profit and burn employees out. You want to make that meeting tonight… but if you don’t get home and crash out… you just might get naked, put on army boots and carry a 30-06 into a bell-tower somewhere…

What’s it all come down to? Timing and communication. In the cell phone internet voice mail world today it's amazing how we’ve optimized our lives so much we often don’t have time to actually communicate or make that connection for the hobby. Forgetting that it may in the long run be key to our sanity.

VJL