I am a 1st timer and I am just wondering, how is flying? How does it feel? Does anybody have an RC car and plane? Can you compare/describe it with something? Sorry if it sounds stupid, but i'm just wondering. Is it fun?



Shredder111[>:]

No it's not fun. It's kinda of like a woman. It will suck your wallet dry and leave you wanting more. Yet, we men are stupid enough to keep coming back for more and more.

Wow, this really doesn't help I understand the wallet thing though, it's the exact same for cars



Shredder111[>:]

I find it very fun otherwise I wouldn't do it. Honestly, I haven't had this much fun since I used to race motocross as a teenager.

For me, I concentrate so hard on controlling the plane, everything else just gets blocked out - while I'm flying it's pretty much just me and the plane, the rest of the world has gone away. Sure, there are distractions like people landing in front of you, other planes in the air...but you learn to watch them and your plane at the same time. You get a feel for it - you develop situational awareness.

Sometimes its stressful, sometimes its nerve wracking and sometimes its relaxing. It all depends on the type of flying you're doing and how comfortable you are with it. When I first started I was thrilled to just be making a turn and seeing the plane in the air but like the other poster said - you want more. A nice big roll with a P-51 can be a breath taking sight if flown scale like. Stall turns (hammerheads) can be so much fun just watching the plane reach its stall point and then enter a controlled "fall".

...and then when you land, there is a sense of relief and accomplishment. The plane is back down safely, you can now really think about you were doing.
I actually enjoy flying more on the drive home after a good day than when I am doing the flying. The reflection of what transpired that day, the rush of adrenalin, the relief - all of those feelings come back on the drive home and you can piece them together in your head.

Best of luck to you - come back and tell us how it felt the first time you go up!

The planes and the flying are great, no question about it, but for me the best part has been the people I`ve met and friends made. Heck, meeting for breakfast and heading for the field for a couple of hours of maintenance followed up by a couple of hours of flying and talking and laughing is just about as good as it gets in my book.

Learning to fly is just your ticket to get in the game. The real fun is chasing your buddies or doing touch n goes in formation with your pals.

It's evil. It sucks your brain out. All you can think about is model airplanes -- day & night. It ruins you financially, wrecks your marriage, alienates your friends -- but yes, it's fun.

Its great...tons of fun...then "dumb thumbs" kick in and all you can do is curse it..lol

It's a lot of fun. I enjoyed flying the real ones more but I can't do that any more for medical reasons. [] So this is next. I also instruct and that is enjoyable too. Helping get someone else hooked is great and you get to crash THEIR planes. Just kidding on that. Being able to get their planes squared around and flyable also helps a lot at the field.

That about sums it up.

You can't compare cars to aircraft in any scale. If you ain't flying, ain't having fun!

i find it a pure adrenaline rush....better than drugs or pretty much anything else. when im flying all my problems dissapear, because i am concentrated on only one thing... FLYING! which is what i love. i found the first flight the most enjoyable, because its like when you learned to ride a bike for the first time, only way better

I've got cars and planes and the cars are fun but NOTHING is more exhilarating than flying a plane and getting it back on the ground without so much as a little bounce. Besides I don;'t think I've ever driven my cars that I didn't have to fix something. I RARELY have to do anything to the planes other than general MINOR maintenance. Poking a hole in the wing on the way out the door is about the worst that happens (unless you crash of course) Seeing a plane you built lift off the ground and fly is indescribable

I think we take things for granted these days with computers and technology but I remember the feeling of taking a box full of sticks and wood and gluing it all together and having it take to the sky and obey my commands. It was majic !! Guys come wired with the ability to tune out when ,for instance you're watching a football game or reading the newspaper. when I'm flying, that's my only concern. A bad day of flying IS better than a good day of work. But it will suck your brain out and ruin your marriage

My interest in RC planes developed when I was about 7 years old. I begged for one for christmas that year and didn't get it, due mainly to financial reasons and the fact my parents talked to a few people that flew RC and they said it was a good hobby but just didn't think a 7 year old would have the approriate attention span to fly. Fast forward about 7 years and I got into electric RC cars, racing for a few months and spending more money than I was able to earn, so I stopped. a couple years later I had a job with steady income so i got into RC nitro buggies, started racing them and thought I was having fun. What I don't like about RC "cars" is if you're going to race them it's like a rat race, be at the track at a certian time for practice, run your heats then the main. everything is on a clock and it just made my weekends fly by it seemed like. Not to mention the cost of maintence, especially on those 1/8th scale buggies.

So during all that time racing RC cars I would go to the hobby shop and see the planes and think to myself, that would have to be the most boring thing in the world. What fun could you possiably have flying an airplane. I thought all you could do with a plane was fly in circles either to the left or right. BOY I WAS VERY WRONG!! Its just like everyone else has already said, it will consume you and all your free time and all the money you're willing to feed it. I've had more fun the past month learning to fly than I did in 4 years of buggy racing.

I used to race a Team Associated RC10T stock truck. I was at the track one weekend when another racer asked me if I also flew. Told him "nah,,,all my wheels remain on the ground." He showed me his electric wing called a Zagi. He had a charged battery pack in his truck and flew a few circuits around the field next to the track to show me. I instantly fell hard for flying. I thanked him, finished running my truck for that day and headed home. Two weeks later I went to the LHS to buy a Zagi myself. I taught myself how to fly and have NEVER run my truck again since that last day at the track that guy showed me his Zagi. That was over 5 years ago. Since, I have owned probably 15+ planes and flown another 10 that I didn't own. Awesome hobby. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.

A long time ago in a far away land (New England) my family spent our summers on a lake in NH. Since I was constantly around water, boats were my life. When I finally got old enough to start working and saving a bit of money I bought a radio (MRC) and a boat kit (Dumas SKdaddle JR). I built the boat, installed the engine and radio and had a ball. I also used the radio in a car. As I got a bit older I found a group who raced boats. When I hooked up with them I built a more serious boat and raced some. However, I had also seen a guy who used to fly his float plane on that lake in NH. Eventually, I found a hobby shop that specialized in planes. With the help of the hobby shop owner and one of his friends I built a plane and learned to fly. This was a couple years before I graduated from college.

On graduating from college I moved to NC. I arrived here on a Friday afternoon and went flying on Sunday (I would have gone flying on Saturday, but discovered there were full scale boat races in town) . A couple years later I found a group who raced boats, so I got back into that. I also branched out into racing cars for a while. I still fly (obviously), and recently got back into boat racing. I really like boat racing, but it's only fun if you've got a good group to race with. I only run my boats at a race, or when getting ready for a race. I enjoy the challenge of racing, but wouldn't have boats if all I did with them was run them in random patterns around a pond. Cars were the same, only interesting in a race environment.

For me, flying is both relaxing and challenging. I can take a couple planes to the field and just bore holes in the sky, shoot touch and goes, etc, relaxing. Yes, shooting touch and goes is relaxing for me. Or I can challenge myself with aerobatics, low passes, flying inverted, formation flying with a buddy, etc. When I'm in the mood for a speed fix I bring my Shrike to the field.

Out of all of the possible R/C branches I think flying presents the greatest personal mental challenge. Boat and cars are more about setup, competition, and lots of $.

Flying is great fun & much harder to learn, at least for me than cars. I had an 1/8 scale Ofna car that would do 80 mph. I took to it like a duck to water in no time at all. Spent that last year learning to fly & I still suck at it. But it is fun!!

shredder111, you can compare rc cars to anything that works in the 2 dimensional field, but to compare then to flying aircraft is not on , because aircraft fly in a 3 dimensional field. Driving cars and boats successfully does require you to learn a new skill and lots of practice, but to achieve the benifits of those skills you need to race somebody. Having said that , you may well be a national champion at rc cars , but you wont be able to fly an aircraft with those skills. Why??? Because the wheels are always on the ground, With an aircraft, you still have to turn left and right, but you have to also maintain altitude at the same time. Then comes aerobatics, positive and negative loops, stall turns , rolls, fast and slow, all controlled , and many other manuevers. So can someone compare the 2? NO
Is it fun? Yes i think so. It is a skillful challenge that has no end. Even for people like Chip Hyde , and Goldberg and many others who are world champions at this hobby, they still cant do everything. The challenge for perfection is like trying to find the end of the universe, there is no end. So the fun part comes in with flying with fellow pilots, discussing new tactics and new models honing your skills all the time to achive a better personal skill, and achieve all this without having daily crashes, i can honestly say i fly over 300 days a year, being retired, and my last crash was2 1/2 years ago, and yes i do fly 3d pattern, when i am not instructing. So if you want a challenging hobby, by all means learn how to fly , and always aim to make each flight as better than the last one.
Bill :- down-under in Australia.

Sounds cool guys, thanks for the feedback. I'm in



Shredder111[>:]

I think of it like this.

When i raced cars, i looked 15-20 feet in front of the car, and reacted to something as it happened.

In planes, you have to look 100feet or more ahead (or at least think it) and react to things that might happen before they happen.

Also, in planes you find that you use all of your senses more.

Obvious sight...sound constantly (listening to the motor, hearing it try to lean out before a deadstick, also listening to your surroundings for other people)

Smell (when your working on the motor after a run, the smell can tell you alot about how it ran)

Constantly "feeling" the wind and thinking about it

And of course..."taste" sweet success on every perfect flight!

The major difference, as some have said...but not quite, is the competition.

With cars, its hard to have fun outside of a competition. So everyone is pretty much always competitive, not a bad thing neccessarily but it does tend to interfere with the relationships/freindships that could be formed. At the flying feild, competitions are just "extras" and stricktly for bragging rights (might be a prize involved at funflys and stuff...but its still really about the bragging!)

Cars seems like so sweet to me (carpet racing for a LONG time) untill i flew...the dat after my first flight i sold all of my cars except my old RC-10T2 that i keep around for the occasional bashing (and something to play with with the plane batts are charging)

There is one flyer who broght out a nitro powered RC car to the field to try out. He ran it up and down the runway for about 6 tanks of fuel. I watched it and ya, it was fast but all it could do was go straight, turn right, oir turn left. The fact that it couldn't leave the ground (unless it hit a bump) made watching it pretty boring. p.s. that was the only time he brought the RC car out to the field. Constantly looking only down on the runway at ground level is also pretty confining after getting used to flying your planes around an open sky. To me there is nothing better than watching your own plane flying overhead with blue sky and occasional clouds and hawks as a back ground as it leaves a line of smoke behind it. Well except maybe watching the plane touch down safely after 8 or 10 minutes!

Well a good fast car does a litle more than go just go straight, turn right, turn left. If I cobbed the throttle on my Ofna car with wheel turned hard it start spinning a donut that would progressively get faster & faster until it started looking like the Tasmanian Devil, stay on the throttle even longer & it became a small tornado! Nothin but an 80mph blurrr. Too bad it didn't have wings.[&:]

However I must agree with ya that a car at the runway would become boring to watch quite quickly. Simply because you're are allready at the top of the RC food chain. You start with cars & boats which can be mastered quite easily IMO. Then if you're marriage is still in tact, you go play airplane. Then the real challenge begins. First to convinve Momma that we can afford to do this. Then you actually have to learn to fly which after mastering cars & boats & watching guys that do fly make it look so easy, is gonna be a breeze, until the sticks are in your own dumb thumbs. Then the realaity of how just how large the gap between running an Rc car & flying really is!

By the way kill #6 occurred while camping & fishing over this last weekend. 4 mour & I'm a double Ace.[:@]

Mark - What did you bury this time?

BTW - we're supposed to be encouraging him here. Not telling tales of destruction. Although some crashes, other people's, can be entertaining if done right.

Lol, It was done right my brother trust me! My friend took me as a guest to a private member only campground just out of town here. So I took the little Edge 540 cause I knew they wouldn't go for my nitro trainers screaming around the place, but we got permission from the President of the association to fly the E-Flite. They have a big open well groomed grass area that was perfect for flying & no ppl using it. So up I go with my friend Mike, the Pres. & his wife watching. I was doing very well with it. Starting getting some good hovers & pulling out with some real nice knife-edges. About the time the Pres's wife said wow he's pretty good! My friend Mike was all proud & said yup that's my buddy. I pile-drove it straight in from about a 100ft. lol[&:] It was comical. They were all bummed & telling me how sorry they were that I crashed my beautiful airplane. I just laughed & told them not to worry, that's just part of flying & I got plenty more planes to crash back at the house. They didn't quite know what to think of that remark. The good news is all the electrics are still good to go & I have a reason to get a new aiframe Maybe an Airfoil-Z Foamy! Something that I can glue back together at the seen of the crash.[sm=idea.gif]