Wings of Toy Plane Enthusiasts Clipped
Four years before the Goodyear blimp was brought down Sunday over Carson by a model plane, airborne traffic reporter Jorge Jarrin had his own close encounter with a high-flying toy in the sky.
“I looked out the window,” the KABC radio helicopter pilot recalled, “and there was a little yellow plane with red stripes on its wing 50 feet in front of us.”
Surprised, Jarrin made an on-the-air remark about the radio-controlled intruder, but when the little plane began looping and diving around his traffic helicopter 600 feet above the ground, he complained to nearby Van Nuys Airport.
Jarrin, who has had two such near-misses since 1986, is not the only Southern Californian who felt like saying “I told you so” after a model plane punctured the blimp, forcing it to make a safe but unscheduled landing.
As the skies above Southern California become more crowded and the once-open fields become crammed with development, practitioners of the venerable hobby of model airplane flying have found fewer and fewer local places to safely pursue their passion.
Despite booming sales, model flying in Southern California “is kind of a dying hobby in some ways,” said Tom Empey, president of the Torrance-based BIRDs.
Once the largest club of its kind in the United States, the BIRDs, whose acronym stands for “Beginners in Radio Drones,” have dwindled from 400 members in the mid-1970s to 110 today. For four years, they have worked in vain to persuade South Bay landowners to lease them a flying field.
While the hobby has been growing nationwide, according to Geoffrey Styles of the Academy of Model Aeronautics in Reston, Va., hobbyists in rapidly developing areas such as California have had to compete for dwindling open space. Although they do not require large runways, they do need unobstructed fields in which to perform loops, dives and other maneuvers.
In dense urban areas, pilots increasingly have had to fend off complaints about the noise and velocity of their planes and occasional accidents. The most frequent target of complaints are gas-powered, radio-controlled planes--the highest-flying and noisiest of the craft.
The BIRD club specializes in those and has lost at least half a dozen fields over the years to development and noise complaints, said Chuck Beardsley, the group’s past president. Now, he said, his club must drive 45 minutes or more to specialized miniature airfields in the Sepulveda Basin, Fountain Valley’s Mile Square Park and South El Monte’s Whittier Narrows Recreation Area.
South Bay pilots hoping to fly gas-powered planes closer to home have no choice but to fly clandestinely from “renegade fields” that often are too small and too close to houses for any but the most experienced flyers to navigate, Empey and Beardsley said.
It was one of those bootleg fields that model pilot John Moyer of Redondo Beach was using last Sunday when his gas-powered, hawk-sized Thunder Tiger punched through the letter D on the Goodyear blimp Columbia 1,000 feet over Carson.
Although the pilot was able to guide the dirigible to a safe landing with seven people on board, Moyer was arraigned Tuesday in Compton Municipal Court on felony charges of assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism and tampering with an aircraft, rendering it unsafe.
Moyer’s attorney said the encounter was accidental; prosecutors said the 28-year-old man had been intentionally buzzing the airship.
It was the first time a model airplane had brought down a blimp, but it was not the sport’s first collision with urban life.
In the Sepulveda Basin--one of the closest and most popular model plane airfields--toy planes stray at least once a week into the airspace of full-sized aircraft taking off from the Van Nuys Airport, officials said.
In South-Central Los Angeles, Empey said, hobbyists were kicked off the Southwest College athletic field two years ago after an uninsured pilot’s model plane crashed into a parked car.
In Mile Square Park, rangers last month posted a reminder to fliers that the lawnmower-like drone of their gas-powered planes was disturbing homeowners and breaking the concentration of golfers.
“The sound just kind of travels everywhere,” said Parker Hancock, supervising park ranger. “They sound like this: “NYEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Even those who criticize the sport acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of enthusiasts are conscientious. Many hobbyists have turned to quiet, electrically powered planes or gliders. Most clubs offer training, and legitimate flying fields require pilots to belong to the AMA and carry $1 million in liability insurance.
“The majority of these people are very safety conscious,” Hancock said. “A lot of these folks are retirees, and they put a lot of time and resources into this.”
But Jarrin said that ever since his 1986 airborne surprise, he has been expecting an accident.
“Ninety-nine percent of the people who fly are really good. But sometimes a guy gets a little carried away or loses control of the plane,” he said. “All it takes is one guy trying to show off to ruin it for everybody.”
