The 50-year-old Bronx-based club has been flying radio-controlled planes of every conceivable shape, size and type next to a sanitation depot in Ferry Point Park, a former city landfill in the shadow of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge.
"He pitched basically a radio controlled airplane to fly as a target," says Tony Chong, Northrop Grumman's in-house historian, "A lot of people knew how to fly radio controlled planes back then.
Unified Engineering students modify and fly radio-controlled aircraft in competition.
A section of another is a miniature airfield where enthusiasts meet on weekends to fly radio-controlled model airplanes.
Students engage in teambuilding during an immersive, semester-long project in which teams design, build, and fly radio-controlled lighter-than-air (LTA) vehicles.
"My life socializing with the other fliers is gone," said Mr. Cutrofello, a former president of the Blue Angels Radio Control Model Airplane Club, which has flown radio-controlled planes, some with wingspans up to seven feet, at the field since 1961.
City officials issued 275 permits in 2013 for people to fly radio-controlled model aircraft.
Most of them are deeply rooted in their communities, and each is a slice of Americana — their big flags flying, their radio advertisements compelling attention and their Little League sponsorships and other charity helping to improve the lives of local people.
If you're flying a radio, you can tune into entirely different markets; the information contained tends to be much more than in a picture.
However, with the added software layer, it is technically possible with current technology to control a large set of parameters in order to adapt on the fly radio equipment to their communication environment (e.g., bandwidth, modulation, protocol, power level adaptation to name a few).
