Cost of RC: Then & Now
Every now and then, I like to flip through pictures of old planes and radios in RC magazines, and marvel at how far this hobby has come since the ’60s and ’70s. Even the simplest of our modern planes would have been a mechanical and electronic wonder in those days. An electric-powered RC plane? With a battery? No! How the heck would you get that to work? You mean it runs on something other than alcohol or gasoline? That will never happen! That was what RC’ers, were saying back in those days.
But one thing that always stuck out to me was the price. Newer RC pilots like me, who weren’t around in the ’70s, see pictures of old kits with price tags of less than $40, and it is easy for us to assume that RC then was cheaper and easier than it is now. I am here to tell you that is simply not the case.
I sat down at my computer with this question pounding in my mind, and I researched. I read rarely traversed websites, blogs, and articles, and really found out what it took to build, and fly, a plane back in years past. I decided that the only way to determine the price was to pretend to buy a first plane, using only the prices and types of equipment available back then. I would compare that to the price of a beginner plane now.
In the ’70s, the radio of choice, at least for me, would have been the PCS, which was a four-channel radio that came out in the late ’60s. This was probably the equivalent of a Spektrum DXe in terms of complexity, but it only had four channels. This radio had a revolutionarily low price of $299.95. The servos and receiver would have been included for that price. Next on my list was a plane, and as there was no such thing as a foamie, or an ARF, in 1972, I went with the
Sig Klipper, a kit that had come out that year. The kit cost $32 back then. The engine was a .15 nitro, and although I could not find an exact price, I estimate that it would have cost somewhere around $20. All the nitro field equipment, like glow plugs, fuel pumps, etc., would have also been somewhere around $20, if not more. Together, these prices add up to around $370 in 1972 U.S. dollars. That might not seem like a lot of money, but brace yourselves, because we have not adjusted for inflation yet. To build your first plane in 1972, you would have to spend the equivalent of $2,290 in today’s money! Fortunately now you can buy a HobbyZone Sport Cub S, which has AS3X, Smart, and Safe technologies—which make the plane virtually uncrashable—all for $140.
Though they are not particularly price related, I did want to bring up two more points before I close. The first point is labor. With the Sport Cub that I just mentioned, you take it out of the box, plug in the battery, and fly. With the kits and airplanes in the ’70s, you started with a big pile of balsa, and with luck, created a flyable airplane, but the process would have taken you hundreds of hours. Building a plane would take months, sometimes even years, and for a first-time pilot and builder, the plane probably would not come out great. The last point is crashing. If you’re a beginner pilot, crashes happen a lot. If you crash a trainer plane today, they are usually made of EPO foam and durable, so you might not have to do anything at all. The worst thing that would happen is that you might have to buy replacement parts. If you crashed a plane back in the 1970s, poof, it’s gone. Then you would spend six more months, and the equivalent of a thousand dollars, building another one.
I hope this article has shown you that, indeed, RC aviation in the 1970s is not as inexpensive as most people originally thought, and that all of us today are lucky to have it so easily accessible and relatively cheap.—Hugh Ryder