[Jeff Higgins]

These planes are made of some kind of closed cell foam. The little ones come completely assembled, radio equipment installed, and are quite literally ready to fly right out of the box. All you need is a suitable transmitter, battery charger, and flight batteries. The bigger one required some assembly, but it took less than half an hour and it, too, was ready to go.

Frequency control was our single biggest concern back in the old days. The FCC had assigned a frequency band - 72 mhz - to radio control flying. There was a different band assigned to surface R/C, boats and cars. On that 72 mhz band, there were about 20-30 "channels", or narrow parts of that band, available for use. They were numbered for easy identification. I remember I had radios on channel 40, 44, and 56.

Problem was, anyone with a transmitter on your channel could control your airplane. We had to be very diligent about our "frequency control" - if someone on your channel turned his transmitter on while you were flying, it was an absolute certainty that your receiver would get electronically "confused" and you would lose control of the airplane. Most flying fields used clothes pins marked by channel that you had to be in possession of, clipped to your transmitter antenna, before you could turn it on. It was a really, really big deal, for obvious reasons.

Well, those days are behind us. Everything runs on 2.4 ghz, on the same "channel", but utilizes a bit of cell phone technology to keep us out of trouble. Each transmitter transmits a "globally unique identifier", a code unique unto itself. There is a process through which we "bind" that GUI to the receivers in our airplanes. Once "bound", the receiver will only respond to commands from that particular GUI.

These new transmitters will store a number of models. Mine will store 30, but some will store hundreds. It will save trim settings unique to each model. All we have to do is choose the model we want to fly from a menu and make it "current" before we fly. Gone are the days of a transmitter for each and every model. The transmitter is the "expensive" part. Mine was a couple hundred bucks, but you could spend much, much more.

Battery chargers range in price from about 20 buck to hundreds of dollars. The smaller batteries are less than 10 bucks for a flight pack, the bigger ones might go for 40-50 bucks. They are good for hundreds of cycles.

The ultra micro planes run from under $100 to maybe $150. My bigger Pitts was $200. You can buy replacement parts, from wings, to fuselages, to empennage, to landing gear and everything in between. So, once you have the transmitter, charger, and batteries, the airplane part of the deal is actually pretty darn reasonable. Pretty cheap entertainment, really, when one considers an entire augured-in write off, with no survivors, might set you back a couple hundred bucks.