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Around Town: Going up, up and away

Mark Byrne couldn’t help but feel like Al Pacino as twin jets flew overhead at sun-baked Michell Airpark last weekend.

Mark Byrne couldn’t help but feel like Al Pacino as twin jets flew overhead at sun-baked Michell Airpark last weekend.

The Victoria aviation enthusiast could relate to the famous line uttered by Pacino’s character Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Two years after Byrne parked his aircraft to take up kayaking, he found himself flying high again.

Byrne, operating his father’s Spitfire, was one of several pilots from Canada and the U.S. who participated in Victoria’s Largest Little Airshow, the 12th annual fundraiser showcasing radio-controlled model aircraft in motion.

“It was time to do something different,” said Byrne, recalling why he had decided to take a break after flying competitively for 12 years, his precision aerobatics taking him to the world championships.

“I just realized that was the pinnacle. I’d climbed the top of the mountain.”

It was while kayaking off James Island with his wife, Robyn, he realized there would be no escape.

“We were near [the island’s] luxurious golf course and what flies overhead but an RC airplane, a scale model of a Beaver,” he recalled, laughing. “Sure enough, the groundskeepers were using the fairway as their runway.”

Byrne admits he still can’t resist the fun, thrills and camaraderie that his passion and events such as the 55-member Victoria Radio Control Model Society’s annual crowd-pleaser provide — a sentiment echoed by other pilots.

“It’s a sickness is what I like to look at it as,” joked Dave Sullivan, a Sacramento-based champion here for his seventh year, before putting his YAK 54 Russian aerobatic plane with a Desert Aircraft 170-cc twin-cylinder engine through the paces.

“I feel like I’ve really formed a family up here. From the moment I leave, I’ll be looking forward to next year.”

About 4,000 spectators attended the event highlighted by aerobatics and static displays of models from First and Second World War fighter planes to helicopters. The $24,407 raised, including a donation from the Vandekerkhove Foundation, brought to $188,157 the amount raised so far at the airshows for the Saanich Peninsula Hospital Foundation and Santas Anonymous.

The fleet included twin Boomerang Jets Elan operated by Vancouver’s Paul Dries and Kevin Forsythe, organizer Mike Scholefield’s aerobatic Russian Sukhoi SU26, his assistant Jack Price’s blue F4U Corsair, Sullivan’s red, black and yellow Extra 300, Scott Davis’s yellow balsa Stearman biplane, a Bell 222 helicopter, and Price’s stationary Lockheed F-104 Starfighter.

The crowd also applauded the aerial antics of Snoopy and the Red Baron, piloted by Bob Stovel and Darren Gauthier, descending parachutists and even a flying iron, prompting one wag to wonder if he was as high as the aircraft above him.

Scholefield dismissed concerns early cloud cover could trigger turbulence.

“The clouds are pretty high. We fly under 500 feet,” he smiled, noting the spinoff from the society’s annual scale-model competitions has become Victoria’s only annual air show.

“Once the airport stopped having air shows, you had to go to Comox or Abbotsford.”

Anyone interested in taking up RC flying should prepare to have fun and make a time commitment, said Price.

“More than anything, you need hours of practice,” he said. “Most of these guys have their 10,000 hours. They’ve competed for 20 years, so they really know what they’re doing.”

Online: vrcms.org