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Charlie
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Charlie was elected to the office of Vice President/ Safety Officer for the year starting 2002. Charlie’s first exposure to model aircraft was back in 1957 when his brother was building C/L models. Charlie simply loved the smell of modeling. His first exposure to R/C was 1972 in Kansas City, Kansas. Charlie was watching someone flying and started asking questions. The guy told Charlie for $2000 he could buy everything he needed to get into the air. Obviously this scared him off. Then 1979 the flying urges struck again. Based on what he was told 7 years earlier, Charlie turned to Full Scale. I didn’t ask if Charlie ever got his license or not, but this faze lasted only a couple of years. The story now moves to the year 1996. An employee of Charlie’s sold him a completed airplane with all the necessary support equipment for $250. As Charlie lives in the country, he tried to fly his purchase in his back yard. Charlie stated that this experience lasted for a whopping 3 seconds then was a pile of rubble. Imedeliately, he went to MNC Hobby shop and purchased both a new trainer, and a glider. He also set up the necessary training needed, as he found out from his previous experience of the day. Today Charlie is one of the Intro-Instructors and does the bulk of the training. Charlie is defiantly one of the Hard-Core as he is at the field 99.99% of the weekends year round and always there on our Tuesday nite training sessions. Charlie states he has approx 50 planes in varying degrees of construction and about 25 ready to go at the drop of a hat. He pulls a trailer to the field which always more planes than can be hurt in a day and is also stocked with just about anything you need to make a field repair. Charlie prefers sport style aircraft of all sizes. I tried to pin him down for his favorite airplane. Charlie finally admitted he liked the Cap’s and Extra’s best but they were not his favorite to fly. I asked what his future flying plans were; Charlie stated that he wants to get into combat! Charlie has been the recipient of the crash award on several occasions. He just laughs and says “When you fly as much as I do, your gonna crash”. Charlie is one of the people you can count on to bring food and drinks to share with fellow pilots. As I was finishing the interview, Charlie stated………You know that I am a bigamist, I have two wives, my hobby and that female that I sleep with. | ||