Mrs Tracon (Beverly) and myself Tracon (Sam) met in person for the first time in a White Spot restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in January 2004.

Before our first date we had originally made our first contact through Yahoo Personals on the Internet.

Beverly was living in White Rock, B.C. and I was on the Sunshine Coast in Gibsons B.C. We had about a forty minute ferry ride and a one hour commute between us. The only time we ever got to spend together was on the weekends.

It was on those weekends that Beverly would come out to the field to watch me fly and take the most amazing pictures of my friends and me flying. A short time later Beverly started to show an interest in flying, so I took to the task of building her first plane, a GWS Pico Tiger Moth.

After many hours flying on the FMS simulator, she felt she was ready to take to the air with her new GWS Tiger Moth.

I was amazed at her progess after only a few flights, and she soon made her first solo flight with her GWS Tiger Moth "Tiggy" and then moved on to build and fly her GWS Beaver "Timothy."

Beverly has now moved up to the Sunshine Coast and we live together in our new home located in Gibsons, B.C.

The rest is history and this is how we became Team Tracon.

I first ventured into RC planes back in 1989 when I built my first plane – a glow-powered Carl Goldberg Freedom 20, a .20 size trainer. I didn’t know anything about setting the controls up properly and had the rudder and elevator on the right stick and the ailerons and throttle on the left. This contributed to my limited success on the first flight.

After setting the controls up on the proper sticks, I completely destroyed the plane on its second flight. I didn’t know how to control a plane with ailerons and put it into an uncontrollable death spiral, crashing it into the side of a building. That instantly finished me and I was out of the hobby for 11 years.

Rolling the clock ahead to 2000, I met a fellow – Greg “Grejen” Jensen – flying a scratch-built foam glider in a local park. After asking him a battery of questions, I set off to purchase a similar glider that he could help me learn to fly with. After several hours of instruction, I became quite proficient.

Three years later, I ventured into powered flight. It started with the GWS Beaver and a short time after, I graduated to a .91 size Vectorflight 300s Extra. I got seriously interested in electric planes when I built Beverly’s first GWS Tiger Moth and now mainly fly electric. Since then I’ve never looked back…

Sam

I ventured into RC planes in January 2004 when I first met Sam. Upon my request, he flew the300s Extra the first weekend that I visited him in Gibsons. I was amazed and instantly wanted to learn how to fly.

As a kid, my parents often drove us past a place in Surrey, BC called Fry’s Corner where we would always look for airplanes, as that was the local RC flying field there. Now, as an adult, I view Fry’s Corner and the hobby of RC flying in a very different light.

Sam was happy that I wanted to learn to fly and immediately started to build me a special GWS Tiger Moth. It was – and still is – a thing of beauty. So beautiful, I was afraid to fly it. However, in March 2004, I did start flying the Tiger Moth and soon progressed to a GWS Beaver.

Besides flying, one other great thing RC flying has brought me is a renewed interest in my first hobby – photography. I have had a camera of some sort ever since I was a teenager, but the hobby was an off-an-on thing for me. Now with so many subjects – and challenging ones at that – it renewed my interest so much that I went digital with a Nikon D70 SLR in November 2004.

I still enjoy the flying part of it and am looking forward to progressing to float flying. However, photography is still my first love and I love my new camera. Since then I’ve never looked back…

Beverly