SPAD to the Bone: Taking to the Skies With Scott Sienkiewicz

Tuesday 24 August

Scott with his largest home-made plane, powered by a weed-whacker motor, on the landing strip he mows on an adjacent property.

In the twilight of some late summer afternoon somewhere up island, you might be thinking that a large mosquito has camped out in your peaceful reverie. Better look again. That droning, whining sound from on high might not be an insect intent on sucking your blood at all.
More probably it is Scott Sienkiewicz (some distance away), guiding a remote-control airplane in the airspace over your head. And he doesn’t need any clearance from Homeland Security to do it, though you wish he did, because he will probably run up to you and ask you if you want to come flying with him, too.
Scott flies SPAD (Simple Plastic Airplane Designs). And anyone who’s ever balked at the cost of what they assume is an elite, high-flying hobby would be surprised at just how cheap it is to fly airplanes of your own design. You can make one of these in an afternoon and have yourself up and flying for as little as $6 for your airplane’s body, $50-$60 for an engine and $150 for the radio gear and the controller. And then, if you’re lucky, you won’t go sailing at 40 mph into the nearest tree.
Twenty years ago Scott was introduced to radio control airplanes by Sheriff John Ford while Scott was a deputy. He thought at the time that flying could be fairly expensive and wrote the experience off as a “someday thing.” But his son received one as a gift, and then Scott’s wife Lorraine gave him one of his own for Christmas last year (and by all accounts she hasn’t seen him since except for supper). Scott went looking for planes that could be made by hand with simple designs and found the website, spadtothe bone.com, and that very day he began to make his first radio-control plane out of Coroplast (used by sign companies) and a gutter downspout. A white poly cutting board furnished the material for the engine mounts, coat hangers and bicycle spokes became push rods for the wing controls, and a yard stick cut to size served as spars for the wings. With an engine and radio controls installed, it was time to look for someone else who might like to fly too, so Scott called Bill Reidy, whom he knew to be a SPAD enthusiast.
“I pestered him,” he says.
Scott also got the attention of young Casey Durkee, who caught the fever and constructed a midweight 25-cc class plane and took to the skies under Scott’s tutelage — on a “buddy cord” - which allows both Scott and Casey to control the plane while it is in flight although not at the same time.
“He was a natural,” says Scott. “He learned from playing Playstation. He didn’t even have to use the buddy cord.” Casey was flying “solo” in almost no time at all, and learning the concepts of lift and drag firsthand.
While Scott has all sizes of engine to put into his homemade planes, his “Big Bertha” is a 48”-inch long plane powered by a two-cycle weedwhacker motor weighing 14 pounds with a 72-inch-wide wingspan and a 20-inch prop.
“It took two people to dig it out of the ground from 150 feet up in the air,” he says. “The battery became unplugged.”
Crashing a SPAD is far less heartbreaking than crashing a fine balsa remote plane, since with $5 or $6 you have a new fuselage and can be in the air again a few minutes after. But, says Scott, “it always goes in the same direction — down — it’s just a question of where.” Landings can be just as whisper soft as the best of any life-size airplane, but it takes practice.
Casey, Bill and Scott get together “any time they can”, particularly on a not-very-windy, nice day and they always fly over open fields rather than houses, particularly when they are in “combat” mode, which involves attaching streamers to their planes and trying to cut one another’s ribbons with one’s own propellers. The one who cuts the most ribbon wins.
Parachuting Barbies are a popular diversion, too. Scott’s daughters Brandy and Rylee have very few Barbie dolls of their own anymore, at least not since their father has sent them skydiving from his airplanes. The parachutes are really only window dressing since most of the blonde bombers have catapulted to earth in little more than their birthday suits.
When the weather’s bad, Scott likes building the planes as much as flying them. In two nights one can build a new plane, and have it up and flying right then and there. There are local flying clubs, but, says Scott, “living on Islesboro, it’s an all-day affair to belong to a club.”
And, he says, it’s more flying with people over here.
“We welcome anybody,” he says. Anybody with some downspout, plastic cutting board and some Coroplast. And the enthusiasm to see something of their own design take wing.