So, my wife and business partner and best friend looks into finding out what we can do to better promote our other web business, www.bluewaterpress.com, a publishing and bookstore web site. So the next thing I know, we have a new business selling flying rc planes.

To introduce ourselves, you should know a little bit more about us. We knew each other in high school, but lost track of each other for 28 years after graduation. We went on with our lives and she married and had two children and I, well, I chased my dreams of flying. And not just any kind of flying.

During the course of my career, I have spent time as a certificated flight instructor, a charter pilot, an aircraft owner, and as a light attack pilot flying from the United States Navy’s finest aircraft carriers. During the course of the last 38 years, I have truly enjoyed the things I have done with airplanes. To quote Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee of the No 412 squadron, RCAF, I have, as did he, “done a hundred things you have not dreamed of…” with airplanes. We have “wheeled and soared and swung, High in the sunlit silence.”

It has been a wonderful ride with more rides to come. One purpose behind the creation of this website is to teach others how to fly real airplanes. We would also like to fund the rebuilding of our classic 1952 Cessna 170B in order to start using it to teach licensed pilots how to fly taildraggers. So, we have a lot of dreams and ambitions.

Now, back to the culmination of a childhood dream.

When I was a child, there was a field between my elementary and junior high schools. Sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays, a group of rc aircraft pilots would gather and fly their airplanes. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at flying rc airplanes. But I was never in a position to buy an rc plane and learn, because I went straight into flying real airplanes.

As I learned what I needed to learn in order to stay alive in real airplanes, I never forgot my desire to fly rc airplanes. Every now and then throughout my career I would think about buying and flying an rc. Now, with the launch of this website, I had the perfect reason for buying getting involved with rc planes. So we ordered up a beginning craft.

Then I went out to fly it.

Should be no problem for someone who has logged about 10,000 hours of actual flight time. Right?

Hah! My first flight at the controls of rc plane proved almost as challenging as trying to land my A-7E Corsair aboard the boat on the proverbial “dark and stormy night” with a pitching deck.

More to come...