Texas City RC club a draw for aviation lovers

By T.J. Aulds

The Daily News

Published March 7, 2012 TEXAS CITY — Larry Ammons, of League City, makes a living making sure the jets that carry passengers to and from destinations on United Airlines routes are in tiptop shape. But that’s just his day job.

Much of his free time is spent working on aircraft of a much smaller nature. He’s among 100 members of the Texas City RC Club who take remote-control aircraft to the skies on weekends.

“Aviation is in the blood,” Ammons, 52, said. “Since I was 10 years old, I’ve been thrilled to get wind under the wings. It’s a passion more than a hobby.”

Ammons, an avionics technician manager for what was until Saturday known as Continental Airlines, owns about a dozen remote control aircraft. He likes the variety.

“Sometimes, you get tired of flying the war birds, so you go and fly something else,” he said. “Mostly, though, I like to come out here for the camaraderie.”

The club calls Holland Park, near the Texas City and Dickinson city limits, home and regularly hosts events, including an RC helicopter fly-in last weekend and its Big Bird Fly In coming up in May.

It was during the helicopter fly-in when Steve Horacek, of League City, got to show off his skills. Horacek, the chief mechanic for the U.S. Coast Guard’s helicopter base at Ellington Field, had his three RC choppers doing loops, barrel rolls and other stunts.

He’s a bit biased, given his chosen career, but the choppers are where it’s at, Horacek said.

“They’re more complex — harder to control — and that makes you concentrate more,” he said. “Besides, after flying these things, fixed wings just seem too easy.”

Ray Saenz, 66, started flying the remote-controlled planes in 1958 when he was 12 years old. That’s when RC stood for radio controlled.

“My first plane was a Berkley Bootstrap,” Saenz said. “It was a single-channel, radio-controlled plane you had to push the buttons to make fly.”

Today, fliers use high-tech, multi-frequency digital controls with joysticks. In the old days, the best an RC pilot could do was fly a plane in circles. None of the stunts or loops the RC pilots of today do as basic routines.

During the years, Saenz, who lives in Hitchcock, said he’s crashed more planes than he can remember and has no idea how many he owns, but estimates he spends at minimum $200 a month on supplies and accessories for his collection of aircraft.

Saenz grew up in a time when flying the planes also meant you built them by hand. These days, a call to a hobby shop can get an RC pilot a near-completed aircraft, Saenz said.

“Some of the new technology is better than the old,” he said. “But some of the old technology is better than the new.”

Saenz, who prefers to fly in races, is like a lot of his fellow RCers, who consider flying the remote-controlled planes a sport, rather than a hobby.

“Sure, it’s a hobby, but there’s competition, which makes it a sport,” Don Roccaforte, 53, of Texas City, said.

He got into the flying after first trying out remote controlled trucks in James Grassmuck’s back yard.

It actually was Grassmuck’s father, Mike, who got Roccaforte into the RC planes. The two worked together at Union Carbide, and the elder Grassmuck convinced his co-worker to join the club.

James Grassmuck, at first, didn’t see where the excitement came from.

“I had no interest in the airplanes at all,” James Grassmuck, 36, said. “I only came out here to make my dad happy.”

But as he got more involved, James began to enjoy the camaraderie of the members and the competition of taking to the air by remote control.

Now he is president of the club his dad once led. It’s also improved the father-son bond.

“We talk two to three times a day talking about planes,” Grassmuck said. “It’s that common thing we can talk about.”

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