Aviation Ping!.....................
I remember this.
Had many of those as a child.
Several of the P-19 flight trainer as well as the Stuka dive bomber and P-40 War Hawks.
Crashed and destroyed all of them eventually. No child was ever injured by mine. Glad I grew up in a time where I wasn’t overly protected and actually had opportunity to explore and experience unique things.
My first flight with this airplane it immediately crashed nose first into the ground. Repaired the broken wings as best I could. A couple of weeks later ...again nose first into the ground. there was no real control of the craft with those controls.
We eventually mounted the .049 onto a block of wood, and attached that to a roller skate. That went poorly.
Lawn darts
We had a couple of those back in the day, and I built a balsawood model (P-40 Warhawk). I think at one time I had three .049 engines in my collection.
These go back much earlier than the 70s. I tried to fly them in the early 60s. Well it did fly, but not for long.
Oh man I remember these. My dad bought one when I was about 5. Around 1972/73. It was not this aircraft, it was a P-47. The fuselage was basically two dimensional, just a balsa cutout. But looked really cool. My dad did a nice job, painted it silver and put on all the decals. Lil’ Brown Jug was the nickname painted on the cowling. He flew it pretty well but I cracked it up numerous times. He would patiently repair and repaint it. He even repaired it when I really augured in hard and fractured the plastic firewall for the .049 engine. Good times.
I had one of the Cox propeller-driven tether cars for quite a while. I still remember the shattered thumbnail from getting a bit careless when adjusting that little mixture screw. What fun.
I never used 50 ft lines. More like 25. Put a ring on the tail of planes with a pull pin on a string so I could launch on my own. Never had a Cox plane but built many. Combat with ribbons was fun.
Pussy….
My neighbor had one in the early 70s. While using it, his mom came out and got too close and it whacked her in the head. Really opened up her noggin. No one thought of suing anyone, just a lesson learned.
Speaking of Cox and Estes, we did try to get one airborne using a pair of Estes engines stuck under the wings like tiny JATO bottles. That was an exciting three seconds.
In what world was that??? The Cox .049 ran cool enough to touch while running.
It took about 15 minutes of playing with our new set of lawn darts in our backyard before I discovered that you could stick one deeply into a telephone pole if you threw it hard enough.
They were confiscated by my dad a few hours later when he found out my aim wasn’t so good and missing the telephone pole meant hitting the garage behind it.
I vividly recall the smell of the the exhaust! And the noise...
I spent a lot of hours building and flying U-control airplanes. It was a great hobbie. Much better than staring at a smart phone screen.
> These adorable powerplants are called “glow plug” engines because the fuel is ignited by the glowingly hot engine itself.
Not exactly. They were called glow plug engines because they used glow plugs to get started rather than spark plugs. Basically, they were tiny 2-stroke diesel engines that, once started, kept running on compression ignition until they either ran out of fuel or were mechanically stopped (i.e., crashed). They were loud because the exhaust vented straight out of the cylinder on the downstroke.
Speaking of menaces that were sold as children’s toys: did anyone else here ever mess around with Jetex engines? Now *those* were a danger to life and civilization!