Rekelekt: Quiet Flyers

On Tuesday night after hanging out for a while at the Cedar Valley Park, the kids climbed into the back of the truck and we drove down Cole Street just off of Otis Road and as we rounded a corner, we saw a line of cars parked along the side of the road and a large rc plane swooped down buzzed across the open grassy field to our right.

We parked in the grass and walked over to the field to watch. The CR Quiet Flyers Club (electric rc planes only) had gathered there and they were lined up in lawn chairs at the edge of the field and flying their planes. It was very cool to watch! One of the larger planes had gotten stuck in the power lines, but luckily that guy had a whole fleet of planes, so he didn't skip a beat, but kept right on flying them.

I had my camera along with me, so I took a lot of pictures. It is ridiculously difficult taking pictures of rc planes. When you are facing into the setting sun, then away from the sun, then up at the sky, and all the while trying to focus on a small object that is moving very quickly and getting closer and then farther away... that will keep you on your toes. I've never adjusted so many settings on my camera so fast! It took a bit of trial and error to get some decent shots.

I used manual focus in some shots and autofocus in others. It's hard to say which method is better. I did discover that if I used a slow shutter speed (which would seem counter intuitive), and panned the camera at the same speed as the plane, I could get a crisp shot of the plane, but cause the background to have a horizontal blur, which makes the plane stand out better in the pictures. This effect is really only noticeable when the plane is up close. Luckily, a few of the guys intentionally flew their planes right in front of me several times so that I could get a decent shot. And the plane that you see in the last three pictures... that one got too close and about took us out! He had trouble getting it to respond to the controller and had to crash it intentionally before it hit anything.

This was the first plane I saw (oops):

And this one the other guys jokingly referred to as "the leaf blower" because it was so loud, but it was impressive to watch. It had some serious power and flew very fast, but also used up its battery quickly, too. I hardly got any pictures of it because it was too quick, so focusing the camera on it was extremely difficult.

This little plane flew the ENTIRE time we were out there. I'm not sure how long we were there, but it was a while. This plane outlasted all the others.

The leaf blower again...

This was my favorite plane out of all of 'em. It had LED lights all along the wings and fuselage and it was really trippy to watch.

Alliant Energy showed up amazingly fast to take the plane down out of the power lines. They hung around a bit to watch the planes fly and took pictures with their cell phones.