Cleared for takeoff
Technologist enjoys operating model aircraft and rockets
Bill Wagstaff taxis the red-andwhite Cessna-150 onto the grass runway and acknowledges his clearance for takeoff. The rollout is surprisingly quick, and in moments he is pulling back on the stick to take his Cessna airborne.
As the single-engine plane climbs to join a stream of aircraft already flying clockwise circuits above the small airstrip north of Kingston, the 62-year old Stittsville resident keeps a close eye on the other air traffic, and his ears cocked for safety warnings coming from his spotter. It wouldn’t do to ruin someone’s day, including his own, by getting tangled in a mid-air collision.
The personal risk is small, of course. Wagstaff’s heart and soul might be in the cockpit of the aircraft with the two-metre wingspan flying 30 metres above the airfield, but his feet are planted firmly on the ground behind a barrier at the side of the runway. His spotter stands nearby, and both have their eyes on the sky as he toggles the controls of his radio transmitter to put the model Cessna through its paces for a large, appreciative crowd of model aviation enthusiasts, many of them seniors.
What has drawn everyone to this field 10 kilometres north of Odessa in the middle of August is the 30th Annual Giant Scale Rally, the biggest fly-in event for large radio-control model aircraft in Canada. Wagstaff works a couple of days a week as an electronic technologist in Ottawa, but spends a good deal of his leisure time constructing and flying giant-scale aircraft and high-power rockets. He flies regularly with the Arnprior Radio Control Club, and is a founding member of the Ottawa Rocketry Group that launches at the Connaught Ranges. In addition to local and other Canadian events, he participates in half a dozen or more meets each year in the U.S.
As the various civilian and military aircraft models — all beautifully constructed and accurately painted — drop down one at a time to make impressive low-level passes or conduct jaw-dropping “3D” aerobatics, the mood on the ground is relaxed and friendly. Wagstaff’s flight will last barely nine minutes, seemingly small reward for the many hours he has spent preparing for such a short time “slipping the surly bonds of earth,” but he said he enjoys the technical and social aspects of his hobby as much as the actual flying.
“Call me old-fashioned,” he said, “but the whole point of this is to take your time and grow to love the process. I like playing with machines, and it’s nice to get together with people who have common interests.”
There is a methodical, measured precision in the way he goes about things that likely comes naturally through his paternal genes. Wagstaff’s father was a surveyor in the forestry industry, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were both master shipbuilders. He said he loves doing numeric puzzles, and as a senior at Centennial Secondary School in Coquitlam, B.C. he figured out for himself how ASCII code works.
“It was my first introduction to computers,” he said. “I discovered a computer teletype terminal with a punch tape reader in one of the rooms at school, and laboriously compared the hole patterns in the punch tape with the plain-language printout to puzzle out what the code was. I synthesized all of that and then made my own punch tapes to run through the machine. It was great fun.”
Years later Wagstaff would undertake a degree program in what he calls the “dark arts of computing science” at Simon Fraser University before moving to Ottawa with his wife Teresa and son Alex in 1996. He has turned his hand to many different technical jobs over the years, and says he has patience to spare when it comes to building, testing and problem-solving.
“My first tethered control-line plane was a Cox PT-19 that was very hard to learn, and I had a lot of crashes. I would do all the prep and get it running, and three seconds later it was smashed. I must have had six of those planes before I got to where I could run out a tank of fuel without a crash. What a feeling of pride. I just kept plugging away. As long as there is a horizon to aim for, I have the patience to do it.”
Wagstaff got his start in model aviation in the 1960s, flying bamboo-framed kites in a small settlement in East Pakistan (Bangladesh today) where his father had temporarily relocated the family during an 18-month forestry assignment. His tales of the exciting time he spent as a nine-year-old living at the edge of a jungle with tigers, snakes, giant toads, half-wild Asian pariah dogs and black land crabs that would crawl out from under the houses during breaks in the monsoon sound more like the strange adventures of a young Mowgli than those of a kid raised on B.C.’s lower mainland.
“The jungle started where our backyard ended,” he said. “We would get cobras and pythons coming up into the yard, so we would have to check before my sister went out to play in her sandbox. It was what it was.”
That take-it-as-it-comes attitude seems to describe Wagstaff’s approach toward life in general, but there is a determined streak in him that makes him want to see the things he likes work properly. His involvement with model rocketry began simply enough as a teenager when he sent away for an Estes catalogue he saw advertised in the back of a comic book, but by his mid-40s he was drafting the guidelines Transport Canada would use to create national regulations to allow high-power rocket enthusiasts to push their sleek, instrumented craft to altitudes in the tens of thousands of feet from Canadian launch sites. It was a significant achievement that took several years of complex discussions to complete.
As he brings his model Cessna in for a smooth landing, Wagstaff quietly collects his plane and moves out of the way to make room for the next aircraft waiting to taxi onto the runway. Before he flies again on the weekend he will make small adjustments to his equipment, and share the details of the flight with Teresa and other enthusiasts. The aircraft hobby is still relatively new to him, and he says he is enjoying everything about it.
“A rocketry friend of mine talked me into trying radio-control aviation about five years ago,” he said, “and I’m just now getting to where I can go out and fly a plane and be fairly confident that I’ll get it back in one piece. In rocketry you do everything first, and then watch it go. With RC aircraft you do all the work, and then you have to use some skill to fly it. I’m getting the hang of it, and I’m having a whale of a time.”