DIY RC Airplanes from Scratch

CHAPTER 5Learning to Fly One Crash at a Time: The Splinter Method

Learning to fly from a book ought to be a punch line for a joke, but it works. Don’t skip any steps, and it will go fine (Figure 5-1).

FIGURE 5-1 Bethany first-day flying, left-hand launch.

Our approach to learning to fly at the Brooklyn Aerodrome involves a lot of crashing. This is not how most people learn to fly. At the Brooklyn Aerodrome we call what we do the Splinter Method., Mark “Splinter” Harder learned to fly at night in a windy, tree-lined park in the middle of Brooklyn. He was going to crash a lot, and he did. This approach is named after him for surviving it and providing ...