Sitting in the plane or not ?

[JonLowe at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/7/2004 7:47:56 PM Central Standard Time, 
xavier.mouraux at sympatico.ca writes:


> If someone could give me a small resume of Don Lowe, I will appreciate.

I'm probably in a pretty good postion to do this since he is my Dad.  He has 
been in model airplanes literally his whole life, and RC since the early 
1950s.  Some of my earliest memeories where him at a flying field with a ground 
based transmitter flying rudder only with rubber powered escapements.  He 
progressed as radio technolgy progressed, up thru reeds, analog and finally digital 
proportional.  He and another member of our club in Ohio bought one of the 
first, if not the first, digital proportional systems in our club, an F&M.  That 
system spent more time back at the factory that in the air as it went thru 
upgrade after upgrade to eliminate glitching.  Each time it came back it had 
another little circuit board added into the already huge receiver.

He was involved in the earliest days of pattern and still has a trophy from 
winning an Air  Force RC championship in the early 50s (1952?).  In the mid 
60s, he started designing the Phoenix series of airplanes, then very radical due 
to their swept wings.  Starting with the Phoenix 5 in the late 1970s, and 
progressing thru the Phoenix 10 in the 80s, they were one of the standards, if not 
THE standard that other pattern airplanes were measured by,  were flown by 
hundreds of pilots, and various versions were kitted by several companies.  He's 
got a photo that was recently published in RCM that shows about 20 Phoenix's 
at a single contest.  He competed all over, won a lot of contests, but 
unfortunately never made the US team for the World Championships.  He was the team 
manager a few times in the 80s.  He also competed in the early TOCs and was 
close friends with Bill Bennett who founded and sponsored the TOCs.  He has since 
had the Masters at Triple Tree, where the Joe Nall is held, named after him, 
the Don Lowe Masters.  By the way, the event this year will pay significant 
money and is invitation only!  He is very active in the organization of the 
event, and there will be some innovations in how the sequences are structured.

Dad was also the President of AMA just prior to Dave Brown for several terms. 
 He is still the head of the AMA Safety Committee.

He is still very active in RC, and flys everyday the weather is nice, but no 
longer competes. However, with a little concentrated practice, he could still 
do very well at contests.  I wish I could fly as well as he does at age 79!  
He now flys big birds almost exclusively.  When I was down over Christmas, we 
flew everyday.  You can expect an article from him soon on the new Hanger 9 
Extra 330S  (a VERY nice airplane, BTW).

Jon Lowe
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