We all know about the lovely ladies who graced the covers of such manly car and bike magazines as Easy Rider, Hot Rod, and Lowrider… but there was another type of magazine that gave those macho muscle car magazines a run for their money, the radio control airplane magazine.
A radio-controlled aircraft (often called RC aircraft or RC plane) is a small flying machine that is controlled remotely by an operator on the ground using a hand-held radio transmitter. The transmitter communicates with a receiver within the craft that sends signals to servomechanisms (servos) which move the control surfaces based on the position of joysticks on the transmitter. The control surfaces, in turn, affect the orientation of the plane.
The first official contest for RC model airplanes was technically held in 1936, but no contestants flew radio-controlled models that year. The first official RC contest with entrants was in 1937. And it was not until the 1970s that this form of aeromodeling became so massively popular.
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