When I was young and dreaming of being a pilot someday, I used to build wooden, then plastic model planes (and cars). They never looked quite as good as the pictures on the boxes, not because I wasn’t good at putting them together, but I had a hard time getting the paint right. Later, seeking something a bit more thrilling, I bought and built the glow-plug powered, control line planes. It was great fun to put them together and fly them in a very fast circle. I got good at flying loops and flying them upside down. A friend and I even tried out dogfighting with some success, but ended up with the inevitable tangled lines.

Anyway, that was a long time ago, and life kinda gets in the way of those things. I was reminded of all that when I read Chris Anderson’s take on the state-of-the-art of RC planes. It seems that the technology driving things like brushless electric motors in hybrid cars and LiPo batteries in cell phones have migrated to radio-controlled (RC) planes. Maybe some day again…