Come fly away: Competitors reunite at 27th Brodak Fly-in
The wires connecting the handles in flyers’ hands to their model planes are thin enough to be barely visible — especially once they’re speeding through the skies.
But the bonds the pilots have formed have lasted decades.
Enthusiasts from throughout the country were back at the Brodak Fly-In in Carmichaels for what organizer Coral Brodak said is less a competition than a reunion.
“The guys come every year, they say, ‘Hey, what’s going on with your family?,’ that kind of thing,” she said earlier this week.
Every year, participants try out a series of flying events, making loops or tricky landings. While most people assume it’s done with remote control models, it’s actually through a control line, where the pilot carries a handle connected to the plane by wires that help them control direction.
“If you’re on radio control, you can get up in the air pretty high and make a mistake, and that’s OK — you can pull up,” Brodak said. “But if you have it on the end of your line, you’d better know what you’re doing. So I think these guys are better.”
Coral’s husband, John Brodak, founded the event in 1997. Aside from a two-year layoff during the pandemic, it’s kept going ever since, even after John’s death in 2020.
“The first year after he passed, we even had his face on the T-shirts,” Coral said. “It’s just something that he started that we want to keep up.”
One of Monday’s carrier contestants, Jo Shoemaker of New Bern, N.C., has been flying model planes since 1977, when her husband, Everett Shoemaker, introduced her to them.
In the carrier event, flyers had to vary their speed — seven laps as quickly as possible, followed by seven as slowly as possible — then hook their plane on a simulated aircraft carrier on the ground.
Jo, a retired teacher, loves the concentration, she said. She pointed to her T-shirt, which said “Become one with your airplane.”
She didn’t think she could handle stunts, but she found relative simplicity in the carrier event — “high fly, low fly, land.”
“Getting to where you can hang an airplane and get it to stick, it’s the neatest feeling,” Jo said.
She got to experience it again Monday, successfully landing her plane.
“I’ve seen guys just kind of bring it in and set it down, but most of the time I come in with a bang,” she said.
Angstrom Ebrenz, 15, of Smithfield, is in his seventh year at the Fly-In. Back when he was living just down the round in Carmichaels, he saw the signs announcing the fly-in and decided to check it out.
“It’s just a lot of fun being here, and you can go outside and do this and learn from it,” he said.
He flew Monday in the advanced class of the profile stunt category, where flyers perform a series of maneuvers such as loops and figure-eights in a particular order.
The hourglass is among the trickiest, Ebrenz said, along with the clover — four connected loops, performed as the finale.
He and his father, Brendan Ebrenz, who also flew, would practice about a third of the summer, walking out to the field next to the Brodaks’ house where the fly-in is held.
Angstrom’s signed up for 10 events during the course of the week.
Carrier might be harder overall, but stunt piloting has a steeper learning curve, he said. To help him learn how to fly inverted, Brendan attached a set of wheels on the top of the plane and had Angstrom take off upside-down.
Brendan has enjoyed becoming part of the control-line world, where people his son’s age and experienced flyers in their eighties can bond over the same hobby.
“You have some of the warmest guys,” he said. “You have tears shed between people. It’s been pretty inspiring for me to be a part of that.”