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I never actually computed my hours of flight time, but I know it was pretty substantial.
In spring of years past, as the weather warmed up, boy, oh boy, did I ever put planes into the air.
Remember the balsa wood gliders that used to be so popular? That’s what I’m talking about.
You don’t see much of them today. Probably most kids consider them stone age technology.
But for generations they were among the most popular ways for a young person to entertain himself as the season began to change and riding a sled down a neighborhood hill was no longer an option.
The simplest and cheapest were the little 10-cent models that came in two pieces in a plastic wrapper. You’d slide the wings through a slit in the fuselage and fire it off.
According to the picture on the package, you could control one of these things by adjusting the wing and even make the “plane” do loops and turns and return to you. Well, maybe that was aeronautically possible, but I never mastered the art and had to keep running after mine to retrieve them.
Frustrating, to say the least, but it was only a dime and you were kept busy for days.
You didn’t have to be content forever with the small models. If you could raise a quarter, you could upgrade and eliminate (hopefully) the maddening lack of control.
So it was that in time I was able to buy a big monster of a balsa wood plane called “The Hornet.” It had a plastic propeller with a thick rubber band, as well as a wingspan I couldn’t believe. You’d wind the propeller until you felt you’d reached the breaking point, aim the plane in the proper direction and launch it.
Good range, indeed, I now had. But, as with the ten-centers, hope was dashed again and again. The package implied it would travel down the block and land on its wheels. But I’d watch helplessly as my Hornet took a laser-like path toward the nearest trees. If you were lucky, it would hit a trunk and bounce off, generally with no damage.
If you weren’t lucky and your plane came in a bit too high, you were really cooked. Dads tended to shrug and go back to reading the paper when you reported that your Hornet could be easily retrieved with a painting ladder and a clothes line prop. If you said it had landed on the Joneses’ roof, you’d get an eye roll and a report on what mom was making for dinner.
There was a third type of plane I was familiar with, and it was the most difficult of all. It was not really a plane but a stick with a propeller at each end. You were supposed to wind up both propellers without getting your fingers snapped and then launch the thing.
The picture on the package showed it hovering and spinning like a boss as smiling kids watched and jumped for joy. My experience was that it was clearly designed to lurch out of your hand, make a “fap fap” sound and plunge to earth, all in a couple of seconds.
Was I the only child routinely defeated by toy aircraft?
Well, who knows?
Amid all the uncontrollable flying balsa wood, though, I think I did learn one valuable life lesson.
Don’t believe all those happy people you see on the package.
