The sky was clear, the desert sun not too high, and Bob Brownell was trimming his airplane.

With the help of Greg Lancaster, a fellow member of the Bend Aero Modelers radio-controlled aircraft club, Brownell adjusted the ailerons and other flaps that control the model airplane’s elevation and direction of flight. The goal was to make it fly straight and true, an aspiration I very much supported, since I was going to be holding the controls to the nearly 5-foot-long, single-prop plane in just a few minutes.

Brownell is a flight instructor with the Bend Aero Modelers. He and a few other instructors for the club teach newcomers like myself the ups and downs of RC flying. Using a “buddy” controller — one that’s linked to the instructor’s controller so the instructor can take over if the student threatens to crash the plane — Brownell takes newbies through the paces of elevation change, turning and recovery. There’s a lot to learn, as I found out.

Love of flight

Model airplanes aren’t the balsa-wood gliders of youth nor the inanimate assemblages of punched-out plastic parts glued together and dangling from an 8-year-old’s ceiling. Today, model aeronautics can include high-tech electric or gas motors, radio-controlled servo motors that operate any number of moving parts and state-of-the-art materials used to create powerful but lightweight aircraft. Bi-planes, sport planes, float planes, military aircraft, helicopters, gliders and even real turbine jet planes are available in radio-controlled miniature. They fly with precision and, because of their increased power-to-weight ratio, are capable of more maneuvers than most full-scale airplanes.

At the Bend Aero Modelers flying field east of Bend, pilots take off and land from a paved runway marked with yellow and while paint. The whine of plane engines reverberates off nearby Horse Butte as Lancaster, 39, takes a model Cessna through its paces.

Take off, circle around, land. Take off, circle around, approach, rise, circle, land. The sun glints off the white wings of Lancaster’s fiberglass plane as it soars.

Meanwhile, Brownell prepares his wooden trainer plane for flight.

“It’s a pre-flight check,” he says. “Just like when a pilot walks around the plane at the airport before taking off, that’s what I’m doing, checking to make sure everything’s working right.”

Batteries, radio receiver, landing gear, servo motors. All are looked over and tested before Brownell adds fuel — a fuel and lubricant mixture of methanol (alcohol), nitromethane and castor or synthetic lubricants called glow fuel — to the plane’s gas tank. He fiddles with the engine a bit before taking the plane up for a test flight. The engine stalls, forcing a dusty, off-runway landing, but Brownell soon has the engine set to the right fuel mixture and running smoothly.

Brownell got into RC airplanes 15 years ago, when his son took an interest.

“I thought, ‘I’m driving him out here every day, so why don’t I start flying,’” said Brownell, 69. His son, Scott, 27, is now a professor in the University of North Dakota’s aerospace program.

And Brownell, who lives in La Pine, is the proud owner of 20-25 model aircraft, many of which he stows in a custom trailer towed behind his pickup. The trailer is replete with padded nooks for the controllers and berths for his many planes.

Brownell is a member of four RC plane clubs: the Bend Aero Modelers, two clubs in Arizona, where he spends winters, and a club in his former home of Tacoma, Wash. It’s a hobby he loves.

“Once you get it, it’s a feeling like you’re in the plane,” he said. “It’s euphoria.”

Like Brownell, club member Dave Arato got into RC aircraft because he loved planes.

“My father used to take me down to the San Francisco airport when I was a kid just to watch planes take off and land,” said Arato, 32. “These things fly like real planes,” he said, gesturing to the models for sale at D’s Hobbies, where he works. “They just do incredible stuff.”

Flying high

Flying a model airplane is not easy.

One stick on the complex radio controller determines elevation and directional changes, the other throttle and e_SEmD oops, I forgot again.

That’s OK. There are seemingly dozens of other buttons, dials and switches on the controller, and Brownell assures me the only one I need to be concerned about for now is the right-hand stick: elevation and rudder.

Because Brownell isn’t going to let me try to take off or land the plane. That’s a more advanced skill level than a novice can handle. For now, I’m just going to try to turn the plane in the air without crashing it.

The trick, Brownell says, it to bring the nose of the plane up while you’re turning. Using tiny movements of the control stick, I try. The blue plane responds by banking left, but before I know it, it’s also slipping into a nosedive. Brownell recovers the plane before it pitches into the sagebrush surrounding the flying field, which is situated on a piece of rented BLM land. He positions the plane “three mistakes high” in the sky, then lets the student take control.

Again, my thumb twitches the controller left and down, the correct directions for trying to turn the plane left. Again, the plane angles downward. Brownell coaches me to pull the plane out of its turn, but I can’t manage.

A few more of these experiments ensue. Brownell coaches, I point the plane toward the ground, Brownell takes over the controls to prevent an imminent crash. I recall saying at one point: “Um, it’s upside down.”

But then, on the fourth or fifth try, I successfully navigate a left turn, straighten out the plane’s trajectory and keep the craft at a consistent altitude.

While I can’t say it’s like being in the cockpit of a real plane, it was exhilarating. And although it may be discouraging to average five near-crashes for every successful turn, Brownell assures me that it’s not unusual.

“I don’t care how good you are, eventually you’re going to dump one in,” he said. “I’ve dumped my fair share. We have a thousand excuses out of the excuse book, but it’s usually because of these — dumb thumbs,” he said, holding up his digits.

My dumb thumbs just couldn’t manage the tricky controller well. The stick is just that, about 2 inches long and it moves freely in its spherical socket. Manipulating it with precision is almost as difficult as transferring your perception to the plane. Brownell and Lancaster, a video game writer for Sony, say experienced video gamers tend to be good at flying RC planes; pilots of actual aircraft sometimes struggle with RC planes. They didn’t specify what my problem was.

Club fun

RC fliers like to hang out together. They help each other test out airplanes, they talk gear and they talk trash.

“Everybody shares everything. You steal everybody else’s ideas and you razz the heck out of everybody,” Brownell said.

And, it’s a hobby that’s growing in popularity.

The Bend Aero Modelers has doubled its membership over the past year, said club secretary/treasurer Dan Clark, and now has some 58 members.

Later this month, the club will get together for a fun fly, two days of aeronautic demonstrations, contests, and general fun (see “If You Go”).

It’s a fun event, said Brownell, especially for children, who like to see the planes swoop and whoosh. Kids, he says, take well to flying models.

“A 12-year-old kid can be cut loose after three 10-minute lessons,” said the retired junior high principal. “They have good hand-eye coordination.”

Model airplane clubs have also formed in Sisters, Redmond, Prineville and Madras.

But for those who are intrigued by the hobby, be warned: it’s not cheap. While you can build a basic plane for $6 out of plasticized cardboard and gutter downspout, the electronics will set you back more than $100. A basic out-of-the-box plane could be as cheap as $300 to $400, but most cost a fair bit more. Those who fly model jets could pay from $8,000 to $30,000 for the machine.

And most fliers have more than one plane.

“It’s addictive,” said Brownell.

But for those with the knack, the challenge and thrill of controlling that plane in the air is enough to send them back to the hobby shop again and again.

“The hobby gets a hold of ya,” said Arata.

If you go

What: Bend Aero Modelers Firecracker Fun Fly

When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 21; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday, July 22

Where: Flying Field, U.S. Highway 20 east of Bend, just past milepost 17

Cost: Free for spectators; $10 per pilot landing fee

Contact: 410-9524, www.corca.us or www .modelaircraft.org