Sitting in the plane or not ?

[William C. Harden]

Thanks Jon, you have provided a very interesting and enjoyable to read
write up of your dad.  
 
Bill Harden
 
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: discussion-request at nsrca.org [mailto:discussion-request at nsrca.org]
On Behalf Of JonLowe at aol.com
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2004 8:34 AM
To: discussion at nsrca.org
Subject: Re: Sitting in the plane or not ?
 
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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