Meg Roussos / The BulletinMembers of Bend Aero Modelers Club (left to right) Greg McNutt, Ron Grigsby, John Fetters, Tim Peterson, Steve Younger, Jon Putnam, Tom Royce, Jim Ockner, James, Fredericks, Waldemar Frank, Chris McDougall, and Tom Schramm, stand next to their planes at Popps Field near Horse Ridge.

Harold Lawrence leaned up against a fence on a sunny Saturday morning as he watched a trio of remote controlled Club 40 racing planes zip around two poles set up in a northeast Redmond field at speeds of almost 100 mph.

“Let me tell you something,” said Lawrence, 50, who has been building and flying his own planes for the past six weeks. “This is not as easy as it looks. But it’s a lot of fun.”

For the past four months, members of the Bend Aero Modelers Club, the Field of Dreams Redmond R/C Club and the La Pine R/C Club have gathered in isolated parts of Central Oregon so they could race their Club 40 planes — a style of model airplane that has a 54-inch wingspan and a 0.40-cubic inch engine that can spin a propeller at 16,000 rotations per minute.

They’ll hold the last race of the season at Popp’s Field — a small asphalt airstrip the Bend Aero Modelers own between Bend and Brothers — at the end of this month. Members of the three clubs are also planning an Aug. 16 fun fly that will give everybody a chance to explore their hobby and have a good time (see “If you go”).

“The real focus of (the fly-in) is to promote our hobby and give members of the public an opportunity to experience it,” said BAMC President Waldemar Frank, who has been flying model airplanes for 18 years.

Fascinated with flying

Frank said he was “fascinated by aviation technology and the whole concept of flying” since he was 6 or 7 years old growing up in the northwest German city of Rheine. He had hoped to pursue this passion by joining the air force and becoming a pilot when it was time for his compulsory military service but couldn’t because his vision was bad.

Instead, Frank decided to study aerospace engineering at the University of Stuttgart in southern Germany. He bought his first model airplane kit when he was 28 and one year later met his wife — a University of Oregon graduate student who was doing a study abroad program in Stuttgart — whom he followed back to the United States.

They moved to Bend in 2007, where they now do some translating work out of their home. Frank joined Bend Aero Modelers that same year and took the reins as its 2010 president.

“A lot of people in the club have some experience with aviation,” Frank said, adding that his club’s 45 active members include former commercial airline or military pilots, engineers and people like him who were always fascinated with flying.

But beyond this interest in flying, there’s really no one thread that holds the club’s members together. Some, such as Lawrence, just started building model airplanes, while others have been doing it since they were children, he said. The club’s youngest member is 11 and its oldest is 81.

“There were no radio-controlled airplanes when he started,” Frank said of his club’s oldest member. “(His model airplane hobby) was just building planes out of balsa wood and throwing them in the air.”

The club

Frank’s daughter Miriam, 17, sat in a chair on the edge of the field with a few other new members and clicked a button every time one of the planes flew past the race course’s starting line and finished a lap. This sent a signal to a laptop computer another club member was using to keep score and calculate who was in the lead and their average lap times.

Frank’s plane trailed his competitors for most of the July 26 race. There was even one time when the plane failed to take off on its own and he had to give it a little push so it could get started.

Meanwhile, another club member fumbled around with his plane on a concrete pad off to the side of the Field of Dreams airfield. His plane wasn’t starting at all and he had to sit this race out.

Frank said anybody can go to their local hobby store and get the basic plane and engine combination for about $200. Depending on the model, would-be pilots might also have to spend another $50 to $100 on a plane’s remote control, receiver and the servos that control the plane’s rudder and the other parts that move it through the air.

He said people can buy ARFs — almost ready to fly planes — that require almost no additional work once they are taken out of the box, while others like to buy plane kits that are nothing more than a series of laser-cut panels and parts that they have to assemble from scratch.

“Some people just like to fly; they don’t like to build,” he said.

Regardless of how advanced a plane is, Frank said, the would-be pilots will still need help learning how to fly it and, more importantly, tweaking it so that it matches their flying skills and their flying styles.

“Let’s say you went to the hobby store and you bought a plane,” Frank said, pointing out what he thinks are the main advantages of joining a club like Bend Aero Modelers. “You still need to know what to do with it.”

Frank suggested that anyone who is interested in flying remote-control airplanes should stop by one of his or another club’s events so he or she can learn more about the hobby before spending $200 to $300 on a piece of equipment that might get boring after a few weeks.

He said most clubs like his and the ones in Redmond and La Pine offer a training program where would-be pilots can not only learn how to fly their aircraft but learn how to do so safely. It gives them access to the clubs’ flying fields and, as a bonus, most Academy of Model Aeronautics chartered clubs — a distinction Bend Aero Modelers has had since 1990 — carry insurance policies that protect their members in case their planes fall from the sky and hurt someone.

“Our only restriction is that whatever you’re flying is safe,” Frank said, explaining his club’s rules require people to wear hard hats if they’re near a spot where the airplanes are flying — just in case.

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com