Don Lowe

[Ron Van Putte]

On Feb 8, 2004, at 8:33 AM, JonLowe at aol.com wrote:

> 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).
>

I can't provide the detail that Jon did regarding Don, but can give you 
my perspective.  I was stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB , near Dayton, 
OH in 1959-1962 and 1964-1969 and was a member of the Western Ohio 
Radio Kontrol Society (WORKS).  Don was also a member of the WORKS.  I 
flew with Don almost every weekend and had two Phoenix 3s, and one each 
of the Phoenix 5, 6, 7 and 8 airplanes.  Don and I went to many 
contests together in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.  I was always bugging 
him to practice more seriously so he would do better in competition, 
but he'd help other pilots at the flying field and his airplane would 
often never leave his station wagon.

In the late 60s and well into the 70s, Don headed up an RPV 
organization that experimented with trying to fly R/C airplanes with TV 
cameras and autopilots.  What a great job!

I was the editor/publisher of the WORKS newsletter most of the time I 
was in Dayton.  When Model Aviation was started in 1975, AMA asked him 
to write an aerobatics column for them, but he wanted to continue 
writing for RCM.  Based on what I had done with the newsletter, Don 
recommended that they contact me to write the column.  They did.  
Thanks to Don, I wrote the aerobatics column for 20 years.

I was really proud of the job Don did as AMA president and I'm still 
proud to call him a friend.

Ron Van Putte
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