Eighty contestants from as far away as Japan and Switzerland competed in the 20th Vintage Stunt Championships last week at Christopher Columbus Regional Park, flying vintage aerobatic model airplanes.
To qualify for the competition, the vintage planes must either have been made before 1951 or from plans of planes of that era.
The wire-guided planes flew a course of 12 maneuvers including level passes, loops, figure eights, inverted loops and overhead loops. Many of the planes' two-cycle engines run on a mixture of methanol and nitro-methane.
According to competitor Ed Kunaschk, who crashed his plane, one piloting mistake can make three months and 400 hours of work into "a bag of bones."
