Jet Set - Pilots' models create lightning and thunder in Flathead airspace
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian/Photographed by TOM BAUER of the Missoulian
Click here to watch a video of radio controlled jets buzzing the airfield outside Kalispell
KALISPELL - The distant mountain peaks, so morning-clear just a moment ago, now shimmer through a haze of heat and fuel fumes, and the roar of jet turbines swallows everything.
“Close your eyes and listen,” advises Art Grisez, “and you'll think you're out on the runway at Glacier International Airport.”
But you're not. You're in a farmer's field next to a gravel pit between Kalispell and Whitefish, where a short strip of pavement lies straight as an arrow.
Ad Clark started out flying model planes on a tether in the 1950s. His current jet cost around $8,000, not to mention the extra gear it takes to start and maintain it.
At one end, the thunder - vapors rising from warm blacktop as the jet plane revs and then roars with acceleration. At the other end, an instant later, that same plane stands on end, rising to vertical on a column of smoke, like a rocket, lost suddenly in a thin summer sky.
At 200 mph, it flies straight into another world from the one Grisez grew up in, the one where early model airplanes circled their ground-bound “pilots” on a tether.
“Except for the size,” Grisez says, “they're just like the real thing. You get a thrill just watching them.”
Grisez heads up the Glacier RCers, a club for fliers of radio-controlled aircraft, and he's on the tiny tarmac today to watch Ad Clark and his son Addison fly two of the three powerful RC jets that regularly roar over the Flathead Valley.
“These things are powerful,” Addison said. “They don't tolerate any mistakes.”
And yet there's so much room for error.
“You'll crash an airplane if you're not a good pilot,” he said. “You'll crash an airplane if you're not good with batteries. You'll crash an airplane if you're not good with radio. You'll crash an airplane if you're not good with air systems. There's about 100 ways to crash an airplane.”
Which explains their intense pre-flight focus, because when you plow 38 pounds of jet plane and kerosene into the ground at 200 miles per hour, well, there's not much left of your investment - $8,000 or so for kit and engine combined.
“If you don't pay attention,” Addison said, “boy, it can be a disaster.”
“And when he says disaster,” Ad said, “he means disaster to my checkbook.”
Ad Clark's checkbook was much thinner when he got into remote-controlled planes back in the 1950s. Back then, you started with sticks and tissue paper and when you were finished modeling, you turned on a pivot to watch your tiny plane buzz circles on a string.
A decade later, and Ad Clark was flying the real thing for the Navy, and by the 1980s his son had joined him both in the workshop and on the airfield.
Young Addison flew RC planes in junior high school, and later, when other college students were calling home for money, he was calling home for extra plane parts. After graduation, he joined the Army to fly helicopters. Now he flies Kalispell's Alert air ambulance.
“But one is not really a substitute for the other,” Ad said. “Flying an airplane fills one passion. The models fulfill another passion entirely.”
The models, in fact, seem to get at several passions at once.
They begin in the workshop, where the painstaking attention to quiet detail seems almost meditative, certainly contemplative, a lonely and peaceful fixation in a silent room. There, the modelers glue and build and wire and plumb.
But then the models transform into a violent explosion of sound and speed, still life come suddenly to life in a blast of sweet-smelling exhaust.
“The prep time is very much a time of anticipation,” Ad said. “Then, when you come out here, this is the lightning and the thunder - and without the lightning and thunder, the other isn't worth it.”
Both, though, are studies in focused attention - the building of the detailed and intricate models, and the carefully controlled thunder. Clark's transmitter - through which he steers the jet - is a high-tech tangle of toggles and switches.
Flaps and elevator and aileron and rudder and trim and throttle and landing gear and brakes. And he operates it all without so much as a glance, fingers working independent of eyes, as his gaze remains locked on the jet rocketing above.
“He sits at home and practices” with the transmitter, Addison said, until his fingers are as sure as a teenager with a video-game controller.
After all, there are 100 ways to crash this thing, and only one way to fly it.
“You become pretty procedural in your thinking,” Addison said. “You have to walk through everything step by step.”
Those steps are laid out in a trailer packed with gear - tool boxes and battery chargers and compressed air bottles and fuel systems.
“It's a lot to pack around,” Ad said, “but to feel that thing run, the sound and everything, well I'd pack an 800-pound gorilla out here if I had to.”
Step by step, he charges the four batteries, charges the transmitter, checks the fuel, fills the air flasks for both brakes and landing gear, hooks up the starting system, pipes in the compressed air and propane.
The compressed air - tanked in a scuba tube - spins the turbine up to speed, while the propane heats the system enough for the kerosene to volatize and burn clear and clean.
Every switch is checked before he turns it all on, because this thing doesn't tolerate mistakes. Turn it on with the landing gear switch flipped the wrong way, for instance, and the jet will “curtsy” onto the tarmac, face first.
“Ask me how we know that,” Addison says.
“You learn pretty quickly that you have to be methodical in your checklist.”
Then spool up the engine, bleed in the compressed air and propane, get it good and hot before injecting your kerosene brew.
The canopy locks on - complete with a tiny model pilot in a fantastically detailed tiny model cockpit - and Clark's jet taxis out in a wall of sound. That's when the music starts, there in his head, the throbbing rhythms from the “Top Gun” movie.
He builds power slowly, smoothly, speeding down the runway, then raises the flaps, lifts the landing gear, drives vertical on a plume of bright white smoke.
The plane climbs 700 feet, rolls over on its back, disappears before blasting back into view for a 150 mph fly-by across the deck.
Clark circles the jet and comes around for a second pass, climbing again to paint pictures with trailing streamers of smoke. He carefully watches time, which is fuel, “because it'll glide if it has to,” Addison said, “but about as well as a set of car keys.”
Ad Clark flew 3,000 miles - straight to the factory - to a school where he earned the keys to fly this machine, “and it was worth every mile of it.”
He took both written and field tests to get his license and insurance through the Academy of Model Aeronautics - which sets the 200 mph speed limit, even though the jets will fly far faster - “and again, it was worth every minute of it.”
He and his son are two of roughly 700 people in the country flying with “turbine waivers,” keeping up the 20 flights per year or more required to maintain the paperwork.
He's flown model gliders and prop planes and he's flown the real thing, “but there's nothing like these jets,” Clark said. “It's almost a thing of reverence. It raises the hair on the back of your neck when you taxi out. Flying the jets is very satisfying and rewarding.”
And then, almost before it began, it seems, the tiny jet is back on the ground.
“Never,” Clark says, “have so many worked so hard to fly for seven minutes.”
That's what his gallon of fuel bought him, powering up on high and jacked by 40 pounds of thrust.
But in the end, he says, the real rush isn't today's power and speed and noise - although those are a big part of it all. No, the real rush for Clark happened a couple decades back, when Addison first joined his dad on the field.
“That's the greatest part, is doing it with my son,” Clark said. “It's fun to do this, and to do it with your friends and with your son, well, that's more like magic. That's the real lighting and thunder.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com. Photographer Tom Bauer can be reached at 523-5270 or at tbauer@missoulian.com.
On deck
Montana's only air show this summer comes complete with the roar of jet turbines and screaming fly-bys at 200 mph - all in a tiny turbined package.
Builders and flyers of model jets are gathering near Kalispell July 18, 19 and 20 for a radio-controlled air show that promises all the thrill of the big guys. Gates open at 9 a.m. each day at the model airfield, just south of Highway 40 on Whitefish Stage Road.
Admittance is free, but organizers are requesting a $5-per-car donation for parking.
Pilots are expected from as far away as Washington, Utah, Nevada and Hawaii.
“It's a real gathering of airplane enthusiasts,” organizer Ad Clark said, and features miniature versions of the F-100, F-16 and F-22 fighter jets, as well as sport jets and much more.
Concessionaires will be on hand with food and beverage.
