Reading about the Boy Scouts reminded me of the time right after I had left the scouts. I met up with a new pack once we'd moved to Duluth, but I didn't join. I lived on a military base where the Scouts were all involved in model aircraft and learning ground school.
But my dad wasn't a pilot. He was a radar man, and I was fixing TVs and building rockets (and an aircraft) that you couldn't fly anywhere near the base. Ummm . . . Legally, that is . . . not within the DADS range (Duluth Air Defense Sector) where the USAF were going to be flying 24/7/365.
While the scouts were piloting the sanctioned (boring) control line Voodoos and Yaks, we were lost in the Minnesota woods, shooting experimental rockets off a derelict raft in a pond.
In that time I was 14, and I built a free-flight 1-meter span propeller airplane that was totally illegal to fly there. I set it off low over Lake Superior with a long range add-on tank of nitro methane and methanol, and tracked it off into the hazy distance as it slowly climbed aloft.
It surely ran out of fuel before reaching Canada, and plunged into the waves. It would have had fuel for only 40 minutes of powered flight. Canada was hours away for my craft.
But sometimes gliders catch the wind and are hoisted high. Any windshear could have driven it to Wisconsin or back to the Iron Range north of Duluth. It might have landed in the Muskeg far to the north. Nobody will ever know.
And my crime still goes unpunished, except for the loss of a plane I found couldn't legally fly, once it was built.
But my dad wasn't a pilot. He was a radar man, and I was fixing TVs and building rockets (and an aircraft) that you couldn't fly anywhere near the base. Ummm . . . Legally, that is . . . not within the DADS range (Duluth Air Defense Sector) where the USAF were going to be flying 24/7/365.
While the scouts were piloting the sanctioned (boring) control line Voodoos and Yaks, we were lost in the Minnesota woods, shooting experimental rockets off a derelict raft in a pond.
In that time I was 14, and I built a free-flight 1-meter span propeller airplane that was totally illegal to fly there. I set it off low over Lake Superior with a long range add-on tank of nitro methane and methanol, and tracked it off into the hazy distance as it slowly climbed aloft.
It surely ran out of fuel before reaching Canada, and plunged into the waves. It would have had fuel for only 40 minutes of powered flight. Canada was hours away for my craft.
But sometimes gliders catch the wind and are hoisted high. Any windshear could have driven it to Wisconsin or back to the Iron Range north of Duluth. It might have landed in the Muskeg far to the north. Nobody will ever know.
And my crime still goes unpunished, except for the loss of a plane I found couldn't legally fly, once it was built.
