Jason Webberley watched from the bank Sunday as his son, 9-year-old Landon, rolled, dipped, dove and spun his radio-controlled float plane over Vancouver Lake.
Jason grew up flying model planes as a kid, and he brought a few of his float planes to the lake, where the Clark County Radio Control Society held its annual float plane flying event.
He’s been with the club for eight years, and other members say he’s one of the better pilots. Landon’s been known to show the veterans a few things too, Jason said.
When Jason was growing up, his dad had a few plane models at the house, but he never really flew them.
“They just sat there, and I kind of stared at them as a kid. I think that’s how I got the bug,” he said. “These things are sitting there. Lets go fly them!”
He fell out of the hobby because of school, girls and other diversions, but he eventually picked it back up. He also became a professional pilot and has a full-size plane parked at Pearson Field.
“Went full circle,” he said.
Now, he’ll fly with his dad, Larry, who since picked up the hobby, and Landon, who’s been at the sticks since he was 5 and is also learning to fly real planes.
“You can see he’s learning every day,” said Jason, as Landon’s plane zipped by with a bit too much throttle. “He teaches me things sometime.”
The club usually flies at the county fairgrounds, where there’s a paved strip for planes to take off and land.
Jeff McIlvenna brought several planes, from Piper Cub models to a model of a WWII-era PBY Catalina. One had a decal of him pasted on the windows.
“What a handsome pilot,” he joked.
After years away from the hobby, which he got into as a kid, he retired and decided to go back.
He bought a new plane and did some practicing, and he has since accumulated about 50 planes over the years.
“When I was learning, I had one coming right at me, and I said, ‘Well, what do I do? What do I do?’ ”
“Duck!” he said. “And boom! Into the ground behind me. That was funnier that all get out.”
The occasional crash is part of the deal, he said. The club had a raft sitting on the beach, which had to be used to fish a crashed plane from the lake at least once Sunday.
McIlvenna said his flying was fairly tame, but there are planes built for acrobatic flying that might be nearly 40 percent the size of the real thing.
Other planes are built to look like old warplanes, he said, and the challenge there is to fly it as realistically as possible. During the club’s annual fly-in to raise money for care packages for deployed troops, they’ll host dogfights: pilots will try to nip at streamers towed behind competitors’ planes.
When the weather’s good, McIlvenna manages to fly a couple of times a week, but since he’s also an avid golfer, he has to budget his time.
“I don’t want my wife to be a golf and model widow all the time,” he said. “We’ve got guys out there that are flying three or four times a week, but they’re retired like me, and again — understanding wives.”
Members from the Portland Sky Knights, an RC club based in Boring, Ore., joined the fun Sunday.
Clubs will often invite each other to events, said Pete Neff, which helps create opportunities for hobbyists to fly, and it’s more fun to fly with others. Neff met one of his closest friends, who also came Friday, through flying.
“He’d come over and just hang out and fly his planes, and we just started chatting and became best friends pretty much,” he said.
What got him into flying is hard to say, he said. He’s just always loved airplanes.
“It’s a blast. I’ve done cars, I’ve done boats. … I’ve always gone back to planes,” he said. “I just always thought it was the coolest invention ever made.”
