Nice to hear, thanks guys.
That Clipper is beautiful John. When I was kid in NYC, a LHS worked with the Parks Dept to setup a flying field with bleachers and everything, but I couldn't afford to get anywhere near the hobby then, at best it was stick and tissue control line. In High School, a buddy and I talked a teacher into letting us do a special engineering project, building a RC plane. Of course being kids with no guidance and constrained to 40 minute sessions, we never came close to finishing it.
So as an adult with kids, I was determined to get into it. We started with the Ultra Micro foamies and really had a blast. After a long learning curve to get to 4 channel, we had some wild dogfights. We tried a few larger planes, but quickly ran out of space. The local clubs weren't that welcoming and I ended up leaning towards free flight peanut scale. The guys into it were really friendly and there was something interesting about the difficulty of being simple.
The town we live in now has a beautiful reservoir set up for recreational use, so boats, subs and tanks became the RC focus, since they were much more accessible. And rockets. My youngest ended up entering a National Rocketry Competition every year for the past 5 or 6 now, they have to build a rocket from scratch that performs to that years specifics guidelines for altitude, distance, payload and recovery. The first year they landed within a foot of qualifying for the finals, but haven't been that close since. It's not easy for teams in the Northeast, the window for practice is pretty slim. Usually the winners hail from the dry, flat warm states where they have ideal conditions for most of the year.
At least for me, RC had a fringe benefit: My son took a shine to boat hull design, he even did his Calculus term project on Hydrofoils and ended up in one of the best Naval design schools in the world.
