It was a happy day when that box arrived in the mail from HobbyLobby.

I've wanted one of these since I was a kid, so I thought this summer I'd buy myself a model airplane for my birthday.

The plan is eventually to fly a helicopter around with a camera on it, but from everything I've read, I should start with an airplane first.

Carefully following the instructions and using the limited resources in Kendra's airplane-assembly facility, I did my best to build the ideal flying machine.

Note the perfect dihedral angle my laundry bag allowed me to achive.

I bought a ridiculously nice 9 channel Futaba radio so I could control the helicopter and robots and stuff.

Here we are, almost ready to go.

First flight was the night before my birthday in a field near Kendra's apartment next to the Alewife towers.

Due to an oversight in basic aerodynamics, when I tried to turn the plane right, it veered left over the barbed wire fence into a tree in some guy's yard.  After recovering it, I was amazed that the only damage was a hole in the wing.

Of course the barbed wire fence did more damage to me than it did to the plane.

Luckily enough, I had a yellow index card that nicely covered the hole while preserving a nice wing surface.

That night I charged up the batteries and prepared for another flight.

This time I flew it behind the Harvard stadium in their baseball field.

No wing damage this time, but a few nose dives took their toll on the propeller.

Kathleen examining the plane in the Horowitz lab before our trip to the beach.