Many moons ago, my father built a kit called the 1/2A Hornet. Powered by a screaming .049 and using only aileron and elevator controls, it flew pretty well and was a lot of fun. As a budding designer, I thought it would be cool to enlarge it a bit, change from a flat-bottom to a symmetrical airfoil, and plunk a rip-snorting Cox .09 in the nose - twice the displacement of that puny .049! Dad got me to build this for him for $50 (I learned that "professional" model building was not for me). This is one of the few design concepts presented here that I actually built, and it quickly became one of our favorites. With no throttle, we just flew around at full tilt until the tank ran dry. A two-ounce tank is a little small for decent flight times, so we settled on four ounces for this size model/engine combination. The hardwood skid on the belly worked, but obviously got chewed up on pavement. Design-wise, it's plain vanilla. The classic swoopy fin is the only feature that gave this model any character. But it sure was fun to fly and the basic layout led me to sketch up several more designs based on the Cox .09 engine.

Plans for the .09 Hornet are available. Click here for more info.