TRABUCO CANYON : Hobbyists Proud of Flight Site

Marge Simpson’s grin never waned. Throughout takeoff, during the barrel rolls and even in the throes of a nose dive that would leave the toy plane splintered on the dusty canyon floor, her smile and stacked blue hair remained firmly in place.

When the model plane was finally at rest, a beaming 9-year-old named Ryan Arp ran to pick up the pieces. It was not the first time he had pulled a plastic member of the cartoon family from wreckage.

“My dad made the plane go in the ground once, and you could see the yellow and brown marks on the windshield from Homer’s head,” Ryan said, giggling. “We need to get Homer an air bag. I kind of like when they crash and you get to see the pieces go everywhere.”

Watching the pieces go everywhere is certainly not the goal of the Flying Falcons of Saddleback Valley, but club members admit it is an unavoidable part of their remote-control airplane hobby.

“You haven’t flown until you’ve crashed,” said Bruce Moore, president of the 70-member group that gathers every Saturday along a makeshift airstrip on land just north of O’Neill Regional Park.

The rain-beaten sign and graded strip may not look like much, but they give the Falcons’ bragging rights to the only permanent flying site among Orange County’s 20 remote-control airplane clubs. “And that makes us the class group, or at least I think so,” Moore said.

Under a nearby shady tree, the group of mostly fathers and sons sip sodas, tinker with planes and rib the pilot unlucky enough to earn the day’s “dumb-thumb” award, given for that inevitable slip of a finger that leads to an unsightly landing.

“Dead stick! Dead stick!” a bare-chested Larry Fleming, 15, yelled as the men in the lawn chairs chuckled. Translation: an airborne plane has lost power and is on the way down.

Larry and his partner, Michael Kirsch, also 15, managed to glide the plane in smoothly, and the two sprinted forward to retrieve their hobbled craft, the only homemade plane on the field.

“Our original plan was to make it look good, and then we just wanted to make it fly,” said Kirsch, adjusting the mass of rubber bands encircling the plane’s midsection.

This particular Saturday marked the debut of the orange, red, white and blue plane fashioned by the Lake Forest pair from balsa wood, spare parts and electrical tape.

“I don’t really care what it looks like,” Kirsch said as the jury-rigged plane again chugged down the airstrip. “Once it’s in the air, you can’t tell what it looks like anyway.”

Appearances, however, matter a great deal to other club members, who may spend anywhere from $500 to $1,000 on scale models.

To them, the pursuit of cool is at the heart of the hobby, and nothing is too ambitious--even real leather seats in the cockpits and laser-tag devices that fit onto a plane’s wings and allow pilots to have more realistic dogfights. When the laser device strikes a target, it registers a “kill” shot, which triggers a plume of smoke or ejects a miniature parachuting pilot.

The club’s plans also include installing irrigation and lighting systems for their airfield, which they began leasing last year, and smoothing out the dirt road that leads to it from Trabuco Canyon Road. An even grander plan involves building a scale aircraft carrier from plywood for even more challenging landings.

“We’re really just kids, all of us,” Moore said as the club’s air traffic controller announced another takeoff through a loudspeaker. “Just little boys with big toys. But what fun.”