The Flyin’ King: For Boulder City man, it’s all about craftsmanship

By Ian Whitaker

Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 | 2 a.m.

Dressed in a wool vest and slacks, Bob Beutler steps out of his Buick Century and onto the flat, cracked playa of Eldorado Dry Lake.

The wide expanse near the U.S. 95 a few miles southwest of Boulder City lies at the end of a wandering gravel road that cuts through the desert and high-voltage power lines. With calm winds and near unlimited visibility, it’s the ideal place for flying.

The reason Beutler is here is straddling the Buick’s center console: The Flyin’ King, a 10-pound remote-controlled propeller plane handcrafted from balsa wood. It’s a far cry from the ready-made electric models that have dominated the hobby in recent years.

He pops the trunk to start the ritual, removing a toolbox, folding chairs and a parasol. Fit neatly in the toolbox are rags, tools and a miniature jerrycan that holds fuel for the plane. The chairs and the parasol are for relaxing.

When he first entered the hobby as a kid in mid-century Salem, Ore., remote controllers were much larger and antennas were much longer. Lithium polymer batteries, which today power everything from cellphones to electric RC planes, were still a distant dream of engineering.

Times have changed, and it’s something Beutler sees every time he visits his usual haunt of Bennett Field, built specifically for the valley’s remote-control community just outside Sam Boyd Stadium. Instead of coming to the field with their own handiwork, he sees young people arrive with pre-built electric models. Recently, some have even shown up with drones, those unmanned aerial machines of the near future.

“You used to build everything, but now you can just buy them off-the-shelf from China,” he said. “You might be a good flier but you don’t learn much.”

For the most part, Beutler and the other old-timers get along with the new technology and the scores of young hobbyists it has brought into the fold. They even see it as a positive thing. Still, every month or so he and a friend will drive out here to the dry lake to enjoy the hobby their way.

Beutler sets a tripod down on the uneven sand, screwing a homemade weather vane onto the top. Clouds have passed in front of the sun, and the temperature is dropping. He makes a mental note and begins assembling all of the pieces of the Flyin’ King on his workbench.

Save for the electronic servos that control the plane in the air, the Flyin’ King is completely analog. It’s a kit plane, meaning Beutler had to buy the parts to build it and it requires constant maintenance and care. Its expertly crafted Japanese motor has a carburetor and sucks real fuel. It has real flaps. It comes in multiples parts and must be assembled and disassembled for every flight. The motor has to be run dry to avoid internal rusting.

For most people, these inconveniences would combine to justify buying an easy-to-use electric plane. But for Beutler, that’s the beauty of it.

“It’s craftsmanship,” he said. “It’s poetry when this thing flies.”

He lives as a retired man in Boulder City now, but he came from a time when everything was manual. He credits flying remote-controlled planes as one of the things that propelled him into the field of engineering, where he worked first for Motorola and then at Intel designing microchips during the Apollo and Mariner space programs.

In those days, much of the technology that now powers the digital age was still rough and unrefined.

“It was just stimulating beyond belief. You felt like you were really contributing,” he said, hand-cranking fuel through a surgical straw into a tank in the Flyin’ King’s nose.

His fascination is with design. Of all the sophisticated features in the Flyin’ King’s construction, his favorite is the way two wooden pegs on the plane’s wing attach firmly to the fuselage just by sliding into small holes.

“If you’re gonna get in this, you have to enjoy the process,” he said. “If this was electric, we’d just flip a switch.”

After about a half hour, the Flyin’ King is fully assembled. He secures it to the workbench by lowering the landing gear into a homemade wooden restraint. With a handheld torque starter, he jolts the propeller into life. It kicks inside the rocker as he goes through a process of adjusting the fuel mixture with a small wire sticking out of the engine.

The hobby does come with a price. Just the wooden frame costs $160, and the motor and remote control run around $250 each. A gallon of methanol fuel is $14, but you can stretch that out with a small engine.

He hasn’t crashed it yet, but it would be costly if he did. Beutler said that’s one of the good things about the new technology: It’s cheaper, which makes it easier for young people to enter the hobby. Many of the newer models are made from styrofoam and can survive a few knocks.

Beutler's ultimate goal is to transform the Flyin’ King into a pontoon plane that can float and fly around Lake Mead. The plane itself is finished, but he needs something to help him retrieve it on the water. He’s still a few months away from finishing the wooden boat he’s been working on.

When the Flyin’ King finally skips down the dry lake for takeoff, it doesn’t take long to get in the air. Light and maneuverable, it sounds like a lawnmower with a pitch that rises and falls as Beutler gives it more and less throttle. It can be hard to see against the puffy white clouds, and RC pilots are always wary of losing line-of-sight and later finding their plane in a ditch.

“It’s nerve-racking,” Beutler said, not looking away. “Just a little bit.”

He wheels it through the air, never letting it get more than a few hundred feet away. After a few minutes, the Flyin’ King circles in for a landing. The engine thrums slower and slower until the wheels touch the ground, where it sputters and turns off.

“I don’t have that tweaked just right,” he said, heading off to go retrieve it.