Hobby or obsession?

[RICHARD]

http://www.fark.com/cgi/vidplayer.pl?IDLink=4464984


I went to an airshow and a gentleman flew a radio controlled jet that was probably half the size of this monster!

Totally cool!

[kokopup]

That was an incredible flight and a even more incredible landing. This guy has a bundle invested in just the control not to mention the cost of the plane itself.

Forty years ago when I worked for NASA I had a coworker/friend that built a Super Constellation with full digital control. This was back when the whole world was analog especially in the radio control world. I had not thought of him in years until I saw your post. I Googled His name "Preston Jett Huntsville" and it seems he went on to be an inventor with several inventions pertaining to radio control. He was a true Genius and received a NASA citation his first day of work for solving a problem they had been working on for months.

[pomtzu]

That's quiet a difference from the model planes that my Dad and brother used to build and crash!! I was just a little kid, but I remember that they had to spin the propeller to get it to sputter and start, and it had wires attached from the plane to the hand grip. Once it was in the air, the one flying it must have gotten pretty dizzy going around in circles with it. They built boats too.
Boy - I hadn't thought about that in many, many years.

[blue]

THats just dang cool!! My friends dad got to work with the real Blackbird.

Forty years ago when I worked for NASA

Did you work on the Space Shuttle developement?

[kokopup]

quote by blue

Did you work on the Space Shuttle developement?

I was pre shuttle,1964-1970. I worked on the Saturn 5 and Apollo Telescope Mount. I worked in the NASA Astronics lab in Huntsville Alabama that qualified all the telemetry used on the Saturn 5. I later qualified the Saturn telemetry for deep space flight. The most difficult environment that it had to withstand was neutron bombardment. I spent 6 weeks at the Lockheed Neutron reactors in Gainsville,Ga testing all the telemetry. I had to build in redundancy so I could determine the order of systems failure.