My Son is a Modeller!

My 22 year old son and I went out to fly this morning.  I had converted his 1/2A SIG Skyray to electric at his request.  He put three flights on it, to see how the conversion worked.  It worked well.  With these three flights, that makes maybe eight or nine flights he’s done in the four years he's been with me.  I didn’t get him living with me ‘till he was 18, so he was not raised with models.  He was raised sheltered with video games and no contact soccer.  I’ve tried to get him to go outside and do things, but he never really has an interest.  So I was counting it a victory that he was coming out flying.

Well, after his three flights on his electric Skyray, I had him launch for me as I was test flying the Beginners Ringmaster I just built for the Fly-A-Thon.  According to him, this is what happened.  As he released, a freak thing occurred.  We were using my portable runway I use to launch off of grass.  The runway has a pin for stooge launches.  When I started the plane, it was ahead of the pin, but as I walked out to the handle, he pulled the plane closer to him.  That put the tail behind the pin.  When I signaled release, he let go and the tail skid hit the pin, causing the plane to nose over.  Instead of stopping the engine, it kicked back and started running backwards.  Gotta love reed valve engines.  The plane ran backwards into my son and he tried to catch it.  It stopped, and I thought it had nosed over and stopped.  But as I was walking over, he was holding his hand and I asked if he was alright.  He looked down at his thumb and it was bleeding. “Oh.  I cut myself”.  After getting a paper towel to clean off the blood and make sure it wasn’t serious, I couldn’t help myself.  I yelled out, “YES!  MY SON IS A MODELLER!!!”



At 22, I had all but lost hope of ever being able to say, “My son cut himself playing.”

The Proud Mark