Some guys like speed. Their idea of a good time is a flash in the sky, a roar between the ears, a rush of adrenalin, a high number.

When they crash, they come down hard.

Their flights are short but they don’t care. They’re in love with the hurry.

Others like it slow. Their flights are quiet. They last a while.

Some weave patterns in the sky, getting off on precision. Their lines don’t rise, droop or sag. Their squares and circles are pure Plato.

Yet others defy gravity and tradition with thrusty motors, flat wings, profile bodies and barn-door control surfaces. Their planes freeze in the air, fly backward, tumble and fly on edge.

Motor-Free. Many purists scoff at motors, flinging their gliders off cliffs or spinning on the ground to throw them into the air, surfing thermals and breezes and winds.

Some flyers are looking for a fight. They swoop and circle, seeking streamers, chasing their tails, whooping and counting their kills.

Craftsmen carry on the tradition of modeling, constructing detailed replicas of actual airplanes.

Helicopter pilots, of course, are their own breed. They choose to fly something that doesn’t really want to fly, and their flying styles are often angular and breathtakingly dramatic.

It Takes All Kinds. Vintage builders, micro flyers, giant scale pilots, scratch builders, designers, competition flyers. Then there’s control line, free flight, racing, soaring… Aerial photography, glider towing, dropping eggs or little men wearing parachutes, float planes, flying boats, paper planes, jets, ducted fans… Novelty flyers: witches on broomsticks, lawn mowers, ornithopters, exotic designs.

And flyers who prefer gas engines, or electric motors, or who can go either way.

We like a lot of different things.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that there are airplane fetishists who replace the wheels on their planes with high heels.

Some flyers thrive on variety, maintaining a heterogenous fleet. Others like a narrow focus, flying one plane until they know everything it can do.

Some of us are thrilled with any plane we can keep in the air.

Over time, interests morph.

Personal Evolution. Doug Traub started with a wing. After mastering his OverLord and a smaller wing, he moved on to 3D flying. In the process, he convinced himself that he needed a better transmitter than his Hitec Optic 6. He bought a Multiplex Royal Evo.

“You can mix anything to anything,” he boasted. But the Evo was its own addiction. Doug began muttering, fiddling with switches and dials.

“The servo is assigned to the mixer, which is assigned to a control, which is then assigned to a widget,” he would repeat, reciting from an online tutorial. He frowned a lot. But over time, he wrestled it into submission and became an excellent 3D flyer.

My current preferences are small planes—30-inch wingspans or smaller. I like to fly slow.

And I was imprinted with a flying wing at an early stage of my flying career, so I love wings.

New Flyer. But not as much as Michael Stewart, whom I met at Baylands a week or so ago.

A nice guy. He shows up Sunday mornings with carafes of hot coffee and a box of rolls and muffins to share with other flyers.

That’s him in the photo at the top of this column, posing by a tableful of his fast wings.

Michael isn’t yet fast. He’s a beginning flyer, and everyone in the world has tried to guide him to slower planes better suited to learning, but he can’t help himself.

He’s a delta wing man.

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Combat, Flying, Life, People, Radio Control, Wings.

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