The Father of Modern RC Model Aircraft
Walt Good launches Big Guff at the 1947 Nationals with his brother Bill at the controls hidden, all but his legs, directly behind Walt.
Dr. Walter (Walt) Good
Excerpt from Model Airplane News Magazine 1961 Annual
Bill had gotten his ham radio license by then and I was making my first gas model patterned after the [Joe] Kovel-[Charles] Grant KG[-1]. It was 10 square feet and flew Free Flight with a Brown Junior engine on spark ignition and a 16-inch hand-carved propeller. It seemed only natural that Bill and I should combine the radio and the model and have radio control!
The physics professor at Kalamazoo College encouraged our optimism by letting us take a special lab course to work out the receiver and relay problems. We adopted a portable communication receiver circuit out of the 1935 Radio Amateurs Handbook and found by some experimental changes that it would operate a homemade relay instead of a set of earphones. Looking back at those days, I’m surprised that things worked so well because the Radio Control ship was shown at the college science fair that winter and was flown in the spring of 1937.
This was probably one of the first powered Radio Control model flights in the United States. That ship was dubbed the Big Guff and went on to win four Nationals and ring up 1,000 flights before it was retired. The ship now [still true in 2003] quietly rests in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
1935 Radio Amateur’s Handbook, American Radio Relay League.
“This was probably one of the first powered Radio Control model flights in the United States.”
Video can be viewed on YouTube. Link will open in a new window.
