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<p>I never actually computed my hours of flight time, but I know it was pretty substantial.</p><p>In spring of years past, as the weather warmed up, boy, oh boy, did I ever put planes into the air.</p><p>Remember the balsa wood gliders that used to be so popular? That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m talking about.</p><p>You don&#8217;t see much of them today. Probably most kids consider them stone age technology.</p><p>But for generations they were among the most popular ways for a young person to entertain himself as the season began to change and riding a sled down a neighborhood hill was no longer an option.</p><p>The simplest and cheapest were the little 10-cent models that came in two pieces in a plastic wrapper. You&#8217;d slide the wings through a slit in the fuselage and fire it off.</p><p>According to the picture on the package, you could control one of these things by adjusting the wing and even make the &#8220;plane&#8221; do loops and turns and return to you. Well, maybe that was aeronautically possible, but I never mastered the art and had to keep running after mine to retrieve them.</p><p>Frustrating, to say the least, but it was only a dime and you were kept busy for days.</p><p>You didn&#8217;t have to be content forever with the small models. If you could raise a quarter, you could upgrade and eliminate (hopefully) the maddening lack of control.</p><p>So it was that in time I was able to buy a big monster of a balsa wood plane called &#8220;The Hornet.&#8221; It had a plastic propeller with a thick rubber band, as well as a wingspan I couldn&#8217;t believe. You&#8217;d wind the propeller until you felt you&#8217;d reached the breaking point, aim the plane in the proper direction and launch it.</p><p>Good range, indeed, I now had. But, as with the ten-centers, hope was dashed again and again. The package implied it would travel down the block and land on its wheels. But I&#8217;d watch helplessly as my Hornet took a laser-like path toward the nearest trees. If you were lucky, it would hit a trunk and bounce off, generally with no damage.</p><p>If you weren&#8217;t lucky and your plane came in a bit too high, you were really cooked. Dads tended to shrug and go back to reading the paper when you reported that your Hornet could be easily retrieved with a painting ladder and a clothes line prop. If you said it had landed on the Joneses&#8217; roof, you&#8217;d get an eye roll and a report on what mom was making for dinner.</p><p>There was a third type of plane I was familiar with, and it was the most difficult of all. It was not really a plane but a stick with a propeller at each end. You were supposed to wind up both propellers without getting your fingers snapped and then launch the thing.</p><p>The picture on the package showed it hovering and spinning like a boss as smiling kids watched and jumped for joy. My experience was that it was clearly designed to lurch out of your hand, make a &#8220;fap fap&#8221; sound and plunge to earth, all in a couple of seconds.</p><p>Was I the only child routinely defeated by toy aircraft?</p><p>Well, who knows?</p><p>Amid all the uncontrollable flying balsa wood, though, I think I did learn one valuable life lesson.</p><p>Don&#8217;t believe all those happy people you see on the package.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption"></div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/web1_dracula.poster-2.jpg</photo0><caption0></caption0><photoCredit0>Associated Press </photoCredit0></div><div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/web1_TOM_MOONEY-2.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">Tom Mooney Remember When </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo1>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/web1_TOM_MOONEY-2.jpg</photo1><caption1>Tom Mooney Remember When </caption1><photoCredit1>Associated Press </photoCredit1></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Tom Mooney</p><p>Remember When</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Remember When: Joys, frustrations of balsa wood model planes