Standby Flights

When Francisco “Chico” Chanes flies, everyone pays attention. He is among the facile few who can work the joysticks and electrify crowds with his tumbles, spins, and stalls.

And when he’s done he doesn’t just land, he lets his airplane dramatically bounce a few times on the tarmac.

Then he packs it up, puts it in his car and goes home.

“I’ve been flying for about six years now. I just love it,” Chanes said, as he goosed the throttle and made his plane’s four-stroke engine scream into the next maneuver.

Chanes is a member of the Flying Falcons of Saddleback Valley, the only group among the estimated 12,000 remote-controlled model airplane hobbyists in Orange County who have their own airport.

Up Trabuco Canyon, amid tall sycamores and in rocky terrain, the Flying Falcons have carved out their own little version of LAX. But the group needs more flyers like Chanes, a 36-year-old UC Irvine medical photographer, to fill its ranks and help buy the land they now lease.

With the possible closure of the county’s only public airstrip at Fountain Valley’s Mile Square Regional Park to make way for a golf course, the Flying Falcons think they can accomplish two things: find those new members for the private club and provide the only place left in Orange County for model airplane enthusiasts.

“I suppose in time we’ll pick up a lot of those who fly at Mile Square,” said Bruce Moore, Flying Falcons president, who used to fly model airplanes at the park.

“We have about 75 members now,” Moore said, “and our goal is to have at least 200 people in our club.”

Each member pays annual dues of $225 to help pay the recently signed three-year lease on 41 acres here. The airport is about a mile off Trabuco Canyon Road up unpaved Trabuco Creek Road, northeast of the entrance to O’Neill Regional Park.

With the anticipated closure of Mile Square park to flying, buying this property would guarantee an airport for hobbyists in Orange County, Moore said.

For more than 25 years, Mile Square park has been a popular recreational site for thousands of model airplane hobbyists, said Robert Richards, 66, of Fountain Valley, who is helping mount a campaign to keep the hobby area open rather than allow development of the golf course.

If the county Board of Supervisors closes the area, thousands of local hobbyists would have to travel more than 60 miles to a public airstrip in the Sepulveda Basin in Los Angeles County.

Richards said his group has written letters to elected officials, the federal government and has considered legal action.

“We don’t plan on losing it,” Richards said.

While the political battle continues over Mile Square park, Flying Falcon members have been busily building their airport. Seven years ago, when the Flying Falcons first started flying here, the land was no more than a creek bed.

“We had to string barbed wire, move cattle and put in a water system,” Moore said. “I remember that one day we had 25 to 30 people come in here early in the morning donating their time and energy and that’s what it’s taken.”

It has a 455-foot runway and five pilot stations. There is also a clubhouse where members store cooking equipment and on Saturday mornings take turns cooking a feast of poached eggs, bacon, sausage, and English muffins. They wash it down with orange juice and coffee.

“We do like to enjoy ourselves,” said Bob Pierce, a retired steelworker, who is the Falcons’ treasurer.

On a recent Saturday, one of the first in the air was Patrick O’Connell, 52, president of a fire sprinkler company who lives in El Toro. Standing at the pilot’s station, O’Connell was a little nervous.

It was the first time O’Connell was going to lay a smoke trail from his Extra 300 airplane and Mark Remy, 13, of Mission Viejo had already clipped a telephone wire and sheared off his plane’s wings while practicing landings.

“It’s a simple deal that involves the oil tank being next to a hot manifold and it discharges smoke,” O’Connell said very Top Gun-like. “But it involves a switch you have to turn on and off and it’s another thing that you gotta worry about.”

As his plane scooted off the runway, O’Connell fought back butterflies. But once it was airborne, he put his plane through several maneuvers, including spinning it five times and putting it into a “hammerhead,” in which the rudder is pulled hard right, making the plane sail downward. Then he cut the throttle. All this was done with a smoke trail.

“Why do I do this?” O’Connell said. “It’s the challenge and the fear that you’re going to lose control.”

O’Connell said he got the bug after a visit to Mile Square park, where he watched others having fun. Then one day his wife bought him a plane.

“I’ve been hooked ever since,” he said.

As for Mark, the boy who crashed his plane, he took a long walk to where his craft nose-dived and returned with the pieces sporting an embarrassed look on his face.

“I thought I was over the phone wires and didn’t know it was that close,” he said.

But here, air crashes--and there are many--are part of the sport.

“Hey, it happens even to the best of pilots,” said Chester “Chet” Taylor of Laguna Hills, who was instructing Mark. “It’s part of this sport, we don’t like it but it happens.”

The Falcons are sponsoring an open house Aug. 9, complete with food, children’s games, and free flying lessons with trainer aircraft provided.