Tom

Messer

, Coarsegold

, California

, United States

Posted on
2020-02-14 12:37:03
“I am a 46 year old father of three. I was introduced to models and aviation through my father. We started flying RC when I was 6 or 7. No matter what was going on in life, whether I was being a teenager and going through a rough time, I always had my Dad, and we always had models and aviation in general. He introduced me to flying, building, how to work with tools, how to trim and tune a model. How to deal with the rigors of competition, how to deal with losing a competition, deal with breaking a model. A lot of life’s lessons were wrapped up in this hobby. From my first flight with a slope glider where it all started in the 1980s until now, when I fire up my turbine jet this weekend, I still think about my father. I lost him in 2008. He was my best friend, and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. At one point I almost gave up the hobby entirely because the pain of his loss was too great. It was my wife that pushed me back in, and I owe her a lot for that. This hobby does allow my to commune with my late father in a way, but also gives me a line of though that helps time pass when I go to work for days at a time missing my family. When I’m gone, I think about my current models and what may need to be done to them, or future models, what I would like to build next. Now, my three kids are just about the right age where I will introduce them to some Flite Test models (haven’t built one yet myself, but the ability for my kids to help me build them and “color” them on their own I think might capture their imagination), so I think about that a lot. This hobby has not only kept me close to my father in life and death, but it also gave me a career. I am an airline captain for a major airline, and I owe a lot to this hobby in inspiring me to achieve this career. Remote ID done wrong, as it’s currently written, will kill the hobby. No doubt, where will the next generation of pilots come from?”