Once I was settled in Ottawa I didn’t have as much time as in childhood but as you can see by these pictures of my apartment at 47 Cameron Avenue (near Bank), there were a few planes floating around.

I remember I had a wrecked plane sitting on the top of the brown shelf. A man named Jack was over having a brew (then about 85 years old). He saw the wreck and he encouraged me to rebuild it. That project is the one facing upward above the couch. So this is after I rebuilt it. It does not have an engine installed yet by the looks of it so this is fairly early in the game.

These are conventional “gas powered” RC aircraft. They have engine displacement of about .4 cubic inches (refereed to as a .40 or .46 in model airplane talk). You need to be a member of a club and drive to designated sites to keep noise and danger out of the city.

They have a wingspan of about 50-60 inches and can go perhaps 50-80mph.

It’s pretty fun but it’s a lot of work and if you add it commuting and club fees and other overheads, you really need to have some time for this sort of thing.

After I had been doing some flying I noticed that my equipment (which I had since childhood) was getting old. Batteries, connectors, there was lots of maintenance. So I sold off all my equipment thinking I’d probably never get back into it till retirement or if I ever had children.