Like a pro golfer lining up his drive from the tee, Mark Byrne takes time to correct his posture, balance his weight and position his arms comfortably before beginning. Now he’s ready to go.
With the flick of a joystick, the large but lightweight airplane in front of him zooms across a flat Central Saanich field and lifts gracefully into the air.
“It’s like ballet in the air,” Byrne said of his hobby, precision aerobatics with radio-controlled airplanes.
With a calm demeanour, the 50-year-old sends his brightly coloured plane away from Michell Airpark while performing loops and rolls and turns midair.
“We do a lot of the manoeuvres you see in a full-scale air show,” he said, listing off such moves as Cuban eights, stall turns and eight-point rolls integrated within the loop.
Piloting an RC aircraft, he says, is more difficult than taking the helm of an airplane.
“Flying full scale, you’re in control at the centre of the airplane. But with this, you’re on the ground just watching from a distance. Your mind’s trying to tell your fingers what to tell the airplane to do,” Byrne said.
Difficulty aside, the Saanich resident has been a competitive flier for half a dozen years and represented Canada at the FAI World Championship in Muncie, Indiana. The competition is the Olympics for model aircraft owners, he says.
Four Canadians, including another local, Dave Reaville, travelled to Indiana for the Worlds, competing against some 90 other pilots from 32 different countries.
Canada fares relatively well on the international circuit, said Byrne, usually cracking the top-10 at the biennial World Championships. This will be his first time piloting at the competition, and he’s looking forward to literally flying the flag for his country.
To help judges and spectators identify his plane in the air, Byrne’s painted a large Canadian flag on the underbelly of his craft.
“I’m really excited about representing Canada. It’s an honour,” he said.
The honour, however, takes him out of town during the time the highly-anticipated Victoria’s Largest Little Air show was scheduled to take place at Michell Airpark.
“Being head of the organizing and not being around to get the organization going because I am going to be at the World Championships … it was just too much,” said Byrne. So the show has been cancelled for this year.
“Like any organization you have lots of worker bees and the same two or three people do the big projects,” he said. None of the “worker bees” agreed to step up and organize the air show in his place, so the Victoria Radio Control Modellers Society decided to cancel the air show this year.
“Everybody is just taking a break,” said Mike Scholefield, who headed up the air show for 10 years and passed the position to Byrne two years ago. “We took the option to do a retooling for next year and come up with something different, but the same sort of format for charities.”
Victoria’s Largest Little Air show has raised more than $117,000 for C-FAX Santa’s Anonymous and the Saanich Peninsula Hospital Foundation since its origin. “It’s one of the most successful events in Victoria,” said Scholefield. “We are going to come back next year and hopefully make it a bit different.”