Olathe ? Olathean Bob Kochersperger has been building and flying model airplanes for more than 70 years.

And he has a boundless passion for constructing the rubber band-powered aircraft. In seven decades Kochersperger has accumulated dozens of planes, each with memories of countless flights running through their balsa wood frames and spread over their tissue paper membranes.

When he’s telling those stories, recalling and reciting each in painstaking detail as though it had happened the day before, he can’t hide the overt satisfaction he gets even just thinking aloud about a particularly rewarding or amusing flight.

On a Sunday about 15 years ago, Kochersperger said he threw a wooden glider about 5 1/2 miles into someone’s front yard. Not that he’s bragging, but if you doubt he was strong enough to heave the plane that far, he can prove it.

“Wanna feel it?,” he asked, flexing his biceps.

Plane retrieval

But then he admitted it was really the glider and its design that allowed it to sail so far. The person who found the glider saw Kochersperger’s phone number pasted to the side of the glider and called him three hours later.

“It probably flew for an hour before it finally landed,” Kochersperger said.

He still prints his address and phone number on the planes he flies outdoors. Kochersperger said he’s put too much work into those models to lose them to an unexpected updraft, which is not uncommon when the plane only weighs a few grams.

“I’ve had a lot of planes go out of sight,” he said.

Model plane enthusiast Bob Kochersperger, Olathe, shows how he once hand-launched this glider at Shawnee Mission Park into a thermal updraft and watched it fly out of sight. Kochersperger, who writes his name and phone number on his planes, was called by a woman from Kansas City, Kan., who found the plane in her yard.

Although he’s never lost a plane inside, a school gymnasium in Olathe was the location of one of his most memorable indoor flights. Assuming that it doesn’t bump into anything, his planes have a predetermined flight pattern, Kochersperger said, so he wasn’t expecting it when the plane landed inside the box he brought it in.

He launched the plane from one end of the gym and it spiraled upward and bounced off one of the rafters. The plane then floated to the other end of the gym, beginning its descent. When the rubber band had unwound all the way the plane was on a straight path to the box, a feat Kochersperger admits he likely wouldn’t be able to repeat if he were inclined to try.

Hobby spans generations

“It’s been really fun, and so good to me as a hobby,” Kochersperger said. “I would love to pass it along to as many people as are interested in learning.”

Kochersperger first began sharing his adoration of model airplanes with his four children before they were grown. Both of Kochersperger’s sons and both his daughters spent hours in his basement workshop at one time or another carefully pasting slivers of wood together and sealing the frames with tissue paper.

Around the workshop today, planes built by his children still have a presence. A Delta Dart, built by his oldest son more than 30 years ago from a model provided by the Academy of Model Aeronautics, still flies.

The academy continues to make the same model to keep a whole new generation of model plane pilots flying. Kochersperger has several late model Darts that he flies with students from the Olathe district schools stacked next to the worn model his son made all those years ago.

Even with all his children grown and out of the house, the retired airline mechanic hasn’t forgotten how fascinated young people can be with the wonders of flight. He capitalizes on that state of marvel to get more children involved in the hobby he holds dear to his heart. This is the third season Science Olympiad has included a model airplane flight competition in its annual academic games in Olathe. Kochersperger has helped coach Olathe students through each of those years.

“I hate to see a generation grow up without model airplanes,” Kochersperger said.

Aeronautics career

Last month, Kochersperger cheered on Josh Foster, a Frontier Trail Junior High student he’s been teaching the ins-and-outs of flying the aircraft, in the Science Olympiad event at the library in Oregon Trail Junior High School.

Foster is about the same age now as Kochersperger was when he flew his first rubber band-powered model plane in Philadelphia, where he grew up. Kochersperger’s interest in aeronautics continued long past adolescence.

When he was 20 he enrolled in Rising Sun Aircraft School where he learned the skills of a mechanic. He graduated from Rising Sun in 1940.

Before the end of the year, Kochersperger had a job with Pan American Airlines working on their fleet in New York City.

But the Big Apple didn’t suit his tastes, which is why Kochersperger said he was glad when a short time later Trans World Airlines offered him a job in the Kansas City area. He accepted, and has lived and flown his planes here ever since.