On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:41:25 -0500, Andrew Gideon wrote:

On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 17:50:38 -0800, Ron Wanttaja wrote:

When you consider that 12-year-old kids can go to Wal-Mart and buy an
electric RC plane...complete with camera...for $150

Ugh. The way I flew RCs, back when I was trying, this would be an
expensive way to use up cameras.

These new electric toy RC planes are wonderful. They're made out of foam and
damn near indestructable....they just slip together, and pop apart when you
crash. They don't use aerodynamic control; they have twin engines and you
control the plane solely by differential power. If the airplane gets out of
range of the controller, the motors shut down.

Some are biplanes small enough that you can fly them in a large room (preferably
with a cathedral ceiling!) and when they weigh just an ounce or two, you can fly
the full-tilt into walls and they just bounce off and keep flying. Weather bad?
Just fly the planes in your hangar.

They kind of caught on with some of my buddies at work, and I caught the "bug".
My "camera plane" has 55-inch wingspan with an AWACs saucer on the top that
holds the camera. The camera is pretty-well protected, both by the foam the
saucer is made from and the fact that the saucer is mounted on top of the
airplane (and pops off in a crash).

Spend 3% of an AMU for an "Air Hog Aero Ace" biplane. Great fun, when you can
fly the big iron (or the moderately-sized wood, in my case).

Ron Wanttaja