“You could get killed in that place.” Mom said it more than once as we walked out of House of Hobbies. She wasn’t kidding. Located near the old section of downtown in Clearwater, FL, the shop was the kind of place that scares mothers and, accordingly, thrills young boys. Dust-covered stacks of boxed model kits clogged every shelf and aisle, precariously balanced piles almost touching the landing gear of the numerous planes and helicopters hung from the ceiling. A large hedge maze of ships, cars, planes and rockets, the bottoms of the stacks held models dating back to the store’s opening, sometime near 1960, while the latest offerings sat out of reach on top.

A man named Bob presided over the whole mess, often suffering my seemingly endless questions with a scowl. For some years in my youth, Bob and his store absorbed the better part of my small allowance and my free time while I built a pile of ships, cars and aircraft. As the allowance gave way to an income, my cash and time were spent on a real car, which needed almost as much glue as the models I’d built. My last visit to House of Hobbies coincided with my first girlfriend, and eventually the paints dried up and the X-Acto knives were put away. Decades passed without me ever thinking of models.

Then, last year, I saw a BBC program in which James May (of Top Gear ) revisited the plastic model building of his youth to see if it held any interest for kids today. It got me thinking, and I too began to wonder if models had a place in our electronic world. As it turns out, they do. And for a few people I met, that place is quite close to the heart—even if their definitions of modeling are worlds apart.

Fast
“It’s kind of odd now that I think about it, but radio controlled planes are what got me on a real plane,” says Travis Flynn, a 30-something Californian who happens to be one of the best—and fastest—pilots of radio controlled aircraft in the world. “The first time I ever flew commercial was from LA to Dallas for an RC competition when I was about 20 or 21. It was rough, a huge Texas storm; all I remember was the stewardess getting sick.”

Since then, Flynn has traveled extensively, circling the globe for RC competitions as a member of Team USA (yes, we have a team), piloting models that are a far cry from the plastic-and-glue assemblies most of us built as kids.

While entry-level RC kits retail for near $200 and might include a radio, engine and foam RTF (“ready to fly”) plane, competition-level aircraft like Flynn’s are handmade from carbon fiber by a limited number of builders, and sell for between $500 and $700. A radio, engine, propeller and other bits needed to fly will set you back more cash, but as hobbies go the top end of RC is accessible by most standards. The level of focus needed to control these things, however, is intense. They fly near 200mph, which means things happen quickly.

Competitions often include 10 laps, roughly 2.5 miles, in the air around three pylons set into the ground, and are over in roughly a minute. Competitors work in teams of two, with a caller helping the pilot to time his turns. Judges watch for those who cut corners flying inside pylons—easy to do since the planes are, as we mentioned, screaming. No wonder one member of the San Fernando Valley Radio Control Flyers Club (of which Flynn is a member) called this kind of RC flying, “the cheapest, fastest motor racing sport there is.”

The Valley Flyers are in their 60th year as a club. They meet at the Apollo XI field in Los Angeles, and the membership might surprise you—these guys aren’t exactly kids, though you wouldn’t know it from the smiles on their faces. Tom Hegland, 54, is a NASA wind tunnel engineer at the Ames Research Center. He grew up near the club’s field and says he used to come out and watch them fly when he was a kid. Fred Burgdorf, a senior member of the club, has a history in plastics and fabrication, and now manufactures APC Propellers, which are used by virtually everyone in RC competition. As Flynn told me, “The great thing about this is you see a professional guy, then you have a guy who wears a hardhat all day… It doesn’t matter because everyone comes out and has a good time.”

Slow
Travis and his friends are flyers, in it for the speed and fun. On the other end of the spectrum are the builders. After spending hours carefully assembling their planes, these guys aren’t likely to toss them into the sky.

“Our customers are hobbyists,” says Rick Haas, director of marketing for Revell, the leading brand (and one of the oldest names) in the business. “Children, yes, but a lot of them are adults—people that started out making model kits in their youth and have stayed with it or come back to it.”

As builders are often concerned with accuracy, creating kits isn’t as simple as molding some wings and a fuselage.

“It’s a science,” says Haas. “It’s tremendously accurate. In many cases our engineers are working off the blueprints from the original manufacturer of the aircraft, and build the scale down to the scale of the model we’re selling. If they don’t have it accurate, there are avid historians who will contact us and say they didn’t get this or that right. But we get it right, down to the squadron decorations.”

Baby Boomers and historians aside, Revell admits that getting kids into modeling today is another thing altogether.

“That is a challenge,” says Haas.

Bob Rosenbaum, Revell’s vice president of sales, agrees, but explains that the company’s outreach programs are working. For example, Revell hosts “Make and Take” events at races, air shows and other such venues. Kids are given a model to build, which can then be autographed by a professional driver or pilot. Then the kid gets to take the model home. Additionally, Rosenbaum says Revell and its sister company Monogram donated thousands of kits to kids last year at trade shows and the like, and that the kids loved them.

“It’s not something like a video game, where it’s in the box; you can’t see it,” says Haas. “At the end, they have the model.”

Also: “They learn to follow instructions, they’re doing things with their hands, and there’s a sense of accomplishment, a pride and satisfaction, when they’ve built their model.”

And there’s something else, perhaps even more important, says Stuart Wagner, Revell’s director of sales.

“Models help to build a bond between a son and his father or his grandfather.”

Wagner touched a point with me, as some of my favorite memories of my childhood involve dad and I building models together. Model-building made for countless good hours as a kid, and as an adult it’s something to reconsider. There’s research that shows making models keeps the mind sharp and helps to maintain dexterity. For those reasons and a million others, it seems models are as relevant now as they ever were.

House of Hobbies shut its cluttered doors in 2004, though I read it may have moved to a more organized location in a nearby town. The hobby store I recently visited in Burbank, California, was as busy as ever, and I decided to give them a little more business. For the first time in more than 20 years, I chose a model airplane from a shelf and took it to the register.

“Ah, the X-3 Stiletto,” said the shopkeeper. “This one never gets old.”