Radio Control Jet Pilots

I'd seen my little brother put together model airplanes when we were kids. He hung them from his bedroom ceiling, where they became encrusted in dust and dangled there, forgotten, til my parents sold the house.

So I was expecting some little plastic put-puts when I went out to Brooklyn to see the radio controlled model jet planes I'd heard were being flown out there. I was wrong. These are giant-sized scale model planes made out of kevlar and carbon fiber and balsa laminates. They have real jet turbine engines and cost anywhere from about $10,000 to $20,000 and can take more than two years to build, if you're a do-it-yourself-er.

I watched as their pilots put them through their paces, flying upside down and loop-the-loops and climbing straight up for hundreds of feet, to tilt over and nose-dive back to earth, pulling up at the last moment to level out and zoom by 200 mph, only three feet off the ground.