Heavy into scale

Portland’s pilots fly planes of all shapes and sizes

By Tanya Whiton

Former commercial airline pilot and hobby shop owner Raymond Labonte wants to dispel a myth: The guys who fly remote control planes are NOT overgrown kids with a yen for wrecking expensive toys. “One of the most common misconceptions is that people put all this time and money into these things just to crash them,” he says. Though Labonte acknowledges that he himself flies some “high mortality” planes, in general, he asserts, “People don’t put things out there they can’t afford to lose.”

Labonte has done his dharma as far as aircraft are concerned. He began flying remote control trainers when he was 10; went to Daniel Webster College for aviation management at 18; then finished school at University of Southern Maine while earning his pilot’s license and working line crew at the Portland Jetport. Now in his early forties, he’s president of the Portland Propsnappers Radio Control Club, one of the East Coast’s oldest RC clubs, founded in the late 1930s. He’s also the go-to man for all things miniature, from seven-millimeter propeller nuts to “Robot” brand scale strut covers. Labonte’s tidy, crowded shop on Portland’s Riverside Street is the entryway into an alternate universe, where everything is modeled on the “full scale” realm.

I visited the store on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, and since I arrived early, I wandered the aisles, picking up and putting down mysterious, tiny parts for every kind of movable mini-vehicle. In addition to planes, Ray & Robin’s Hobby Center sells miniature plastic tanks, backhoes, racecars, rockets, and speedboats. And for the old-fashioned sort, there are trains, replete with every kind of switchback and track, and cigar box-sized containers in which wee “farmhouses with animals” and “mountain valley scenery kits” reside. There’s even a ship in a bottle set, with a replica of the Mayflower laid out in nearly microscopic detail.

I experienced a familiar, slightly desperate feeling of enthusiasm, leftover from being a kid with a hyperactive

imagination but no patience for assembly — so small! Umm, how long does this take?

But back to the planes. Hanging from Ray & Robin’s roof beams are scale models of some of the sexier facsimile aircraft on the startup end of the market: the Venus 40; The Tiger 2 (“A tiger that’s easy to tame and playful as a kitten. . . ”); the BalsaNova. The bell on the front door jangles as browsers come and go, all with the focused, restrained joy of weekend warriors at a hardware store.

“Flying these models,” Labonte says, “it’s a three dimensional world. It’s three-dimensional art. If you take the time and energy to build a 1:12 replica of a World War II plane, you have to be an electrician, an architect, a plumber and a painter. And then . . . it works! That’s the ultimate reward.”

Buddy box

So, after four years of manning airbuses for Continental, Labonte tells me, he grew tired of the itinerant lifestyle, though he still teaches full-scale flying privately. He also teaches RC flying. “A lot of people think of [model flyers] as frustrated airline pilots, but that’s not the case. I’ve got a lot of airline friends who dabble with models — any of them that I’ve brought out have been humbled pretty quickly.”

The trouble with real pilots, Labonte says, is “. . . they have preconceived ideas of how to do it. They think, ‘now if I were flying this plane, what would I do . . . One of the things you learn flying [real planes] is not to jump to any conclusions. With models, you have to make a decision right then. Or . . . ”

Or else.

At my request, Labonte gives a crash course in radio-controlled flight. First, he makes a square shape with his hands. “You’ve got your transmitter, see, with two hand levers.” I nod. “The right hand one makes you go up and down, right and left.” I nod again. “The left hand lever is your throttle and rudder.” He pedals his feet on the floor. “In real planes you fly with your feet, in models — Labonte holds up his thumbs — you fly with your thumbs.” Ah. Thumbs. He pauses a beat to see if I’m still with him. I’m picturing the start of my glorious career as Intrepid Pilot Girl. It’s a beautiful blue day. I’m taxiing down the runway in a little red biplane, wearing one of those cool jumpsuits . . .

“. . . and that’s how it works,” Labonte says, and I snap back to attention, and take some notes. “Beginners get hooked up to a buddy box, two transmitters linked by a cable. So if your plane somehow gets upside down, headed for the ground, I can help correct.” He looks at me and shakes his head. “I could probably teach you how to fly a real airplane in the same time I could teach you to fly a model,” he says.

Piper cubs, ugly sticks & trainers

I ask Labonte about his fellow club members, one of whom, a marine mechanic by the name of Randy Greenleaf, I knew from a brief, previous incarnation as Intrepid Boat Yard Girl. Who are these people who can spend thousands of hours painting faux control panels inside a midget-sized cockpit?

Well, they are mostly men over the age of 45. Labonte thinks there are a couple of reasons for this: “Unfortunately, I think kids have a lot of things to take up their time, computer games, simulated [stuff]. And it’s expensive,” he admits. Like other varieties of hardcore hobbyist, Labonte seems a little rueful about the layperson’s lack of general understanding of the very particular particulars of his pastime, and also of the fact that most younger gadget nuts “buy plastic stuff — cars and boats.”

My impression from talking with Labonte is that your average die-hard Propsnapper is as patient and hopeful as Gepetto, investing an assemblage of parts with a dream of flight. For those that just want to see what happens, there are a few varieties of model plane that don’t dent the wallet too deeply, beginning with Ugly Sticks. So-called because “they’ve got no character,” he says. “It’s just a box fuselage with wings and a tail.” Then there are Trainers, high wing, tricycle gear mini-planes designed to look like a Cessna 152, and Piper Cubs, modeled after the 1930s and ‘40s yellow rag top planes.

Uh oh. I’m off again. My red plane breaks through banded clouds over a brilliant tropical sea, scarf flapping over my shoulder . . .

Ahem. And what about combat flying, I ask? (Greenleaf had mentioned to me in a previous conversation that the club might be doing some mock aerial battles). I imagine strategy sessions, the Propsnappers sitting around a table with charts and graphs, plotting air duels straight from the history books . . .

Warbirds

Well,” says Labonte. “You get a bunch of guys, come up with some guidelines. Put a ten foot streamer on ’em [the planes] and everybody says go.”

No strategy?

“No. They’re pretty crude looking airplanes — nobody’s gonna send something they spent a lot of money on up. Because you say you’re going for the other guy’s trainer, you’re gonna cut his ribbons, but really, you’re going for his airplane.”

To wreck it?

He smiles abashedly and folds his hands in his lap. Mmmm. . .

Yeah.

My boat mechanic buddy Randy Greenleaf is apparently the club’s most gung ho member when it comes to duking it out via radio plane: he’s out at the Propsnapper’s field — situated on a grassed-over landfill just off the flight path of the Jetport — every Monday night, with his ribbons tied on, just “waitin’ for ’em.”

Zen and the art of remote control

On a cold, sunny Saturday morning, my friend Heidi and I (Intrepid Reporting Duo) venture out to Regional Waste Systems to behold the real thing — teeny weenie planes taking off and landing, banking and turning up as far as “three mistakes high.” (That’s RC lingo for three hundred feet up in the air.) As we arrive, we’re greeted tentatively by a bunch of fellas who stand braced against a biting wind, hands in their pockets, baseball hats clamped down firmly over their large, square sunglasses. A small shack holds the radio board, and each flyer has a channel number clothes-pinned somewhere on their person.

A model F18 steers around a large puddle in the runway — which Labonte describes as “a bit roly poly” — bobbles across the grass for a ways and then takes off. Vroom. Neeeeeyow. Put put put. Neeeeeyow. We all tip our heads back and watch the plane zoom around. A couple of older men standing behind me comment on the flyer’s prowess:

“He sure can fly it, too, yuh. I couldn’t do that.”

“Nope. I’d be upside down and backwards.”

“Sure makes a lot of noise.”

“Yuh. Well, it’s got no muffler.”

Greenleaf confesses to me that he had a midair collision last week, smashed up two planes. “My engine’s over there somewhere,” he says, and gestures off over a lumpy, dandelion covered hill. “I’m still looking for it.” He shows us over to his plane, a WWII replica, and suggests that Heidi take a picture of it. She does.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “there’s two types of plane. Fighters and targets. Put a bunch of these up there, it’d look just like the skies over Germany.” According to Labonte, Greenleaf is a dedicated flyer, coming to the club three or four times a week, but he’s not a fine-tuning type of guy. “He flies Frankensteins.” (That’s hobby shop terminology for, um, “really weird looking plane.”)

Labonte tells me with a note of respect in his voice that the guy flying the F18 “scratch-built the whole thing, cut his own parts down and everything.” As far as Labonte is concerned, building the planes is where it’s at. He attends a competition in Florida every year called (betcha can’t guess . . .) Top Gun, where the serious pros waft tens of thousands of dollars in remote air technology over a manicured green. He demurs to tell me about his performance there, saying instead, “the ego side of this is long gone.”

Recently, his 11-year-old nephew has taken an interest in radio-controlled planes, and Labonte insists that the boy build his plane himself. “I tell him, if you wanna get into it, you have to build it.”

He adds, “And the whole time he’s trying to build it, I tell him not to get too attached to it.”

Despite the potential danger posed by gusting wind, Labonte sends up his plane, a version of the ultimate biplane, designed for professional aerobatics. He shoots it up into the sky, then rolls it back down, the wings spinning gracefully, before it banks and zooms across the strip. He tells me about June Olerud, a United Airlines pilot with the longest sustained inverted flight on record. She flew her plane upside-down for 1100 miles.

I imagine rumbling across the runway, the wind whooshing past my ears, as the engine screams on ascent. I flip my plane over, briefly catching a glimpse of the tiny, tiny people on the ground . . .

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.