When I was a teenager I was obsessed with remote-control airplanes and boats.
This is high-school-age me with a Hobie Hawk, a two-servo glider with elliptical dihedral. The kit was invented by Hobart Alter, same guy who created the Hobie catamaran.
It had heavy wing loading, so was a fast flier. But I didn’t fly it much because I lost it in a forest of poison oak while slope soaring in Pescadero.
I also designed and built a flying-wing glider. No tail assembly, just wings. The airfoil changed from a lifting airfoil at the root of the wing to a reverse airfoil at the tips of the swept-back wings. That held the lifting surface at a good angle of incidence. The rudder and elevator controls went through a mechanical mixer on the servo brick that activated the elevons.
This is the kind of thing I thought about in high school during my free time. I’d be standing on the ground, with my imagination soaring 300 feet above me, dreaming what it would feel like to be a red-tail hawk.
My dad was a mechanical engineer, and he would occasionally give me pointers on tools and build techniques.
I also made a tugboat out of pine planks stacked and glued, carved to a hull shape, and fiberglassed over. This one took me all summer to build. The motor was powered by a motorcycle battery. It took some perilous voyages across the chop of the Palo Alto duck pond. It had lights inside and looked pretty realistic at night.
I didn’t know this at the time, but my fascination with scratch-built, remote-controlled airplanes and boats set me up for building the fantasy world of Dinotopia. Making these models helped project my imagination into places. Working for months on a single project gave me an instinct for delayed gratification.
There was real peril for the gliders. I once handed the stick to another pilot, inviting him to try flying the wing inverted, and he snapped off both wings by half-looping out of it. Poor guy, he felt so bad. But no problem. I went home, fixed it, and flew on.
My dad built his own glider and put a strand of piano wire in the leading edge of the wing “in case of a midair collision.” That day arrived: CRASH! Down went the other guy's plane. But Dad's plane survived. He kind of grinned, but didn't tell the other guy about the piano wire.
