Salina ? One of the newest weapons of war is the remotely piloted vehicle – sometimes called an “unmanned drone.” These small aircraft can stay in the air for hours, sending back images to a controller miles away, either simply observing or waiting for the signal to unleash a missile.

It’s no toy – but its ancestors were.

Ten remote-controlled aircraft, with wingspans of up to nearly 10 feet, were on display recently at the Smoky Hill Museum as part of an ongoing model-aircraft show called “Just Plane Fun.”

Don Apostolico, owner of Don’s Hobby Shop and a longtime builder and flier of R/C aircraft, was on hand to talk about the hobby.

“I’ve been doing this since 1958, and I still get excited about flying,” Apostolico said. “It gives me so much adrenaline it’s hard to sleep after I’ve been flying.”

His Carden Extra 330S, the largest of the models on display by members of the Smoky Hill R/C Flying Club, is designed for aerobatics. It even has an onboard smoke generator.

“It has a great power-to-weight ratio,” he said of the red, white and blue aircraft, whose 150 cc two-cylinder engine generates 17 horsepower for the 50-pound aircraft. “It can climb vertically, just go straight up. And it can hover, too.”

Don Apostolico takes the cover off his Carden Extra 330S radio-controlled airplane to display the inner workings last month at the Smoky Hill Museum in Salina. Apostolico was on hand to talk about the hobby of remote-control flying as part of an ongoing model aircraft display at the museum called Just

What he really enjoys, he said, is duplicating as closely as possible the look of a real aircraft in flight – something that’s tough to do with a small model that has to contend with full-scale winds.

“Flying in a straight, level line is hard to do,” he said. “It looks like the aircraft is just moving along, but the controller is having to make changes constantly.”

The sport seems to be aging – Apostolico said a typical flier is in his mid-50s or older – and kids are more interested in flying computer flight simulators than the radio-controlled models.

But, he added, all of the computer time seems to give them an edge if they do get a chance to fly outside.

“We call them ‘Nintendo pilots,'” Apostolico said. “One time, I was out with a family and gave the controls to a 4-year-old – he flew just fine. I asked him if he’d ever flown before, and he said he hadn’t.”

Not believing someone could learn the controls that quickly, he asked again and was assured the preschooler hadn’t flown before – but had played with a computer flight simulator.

He turned the controls over to a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old with the same results.

“So we put their dad on – and it was a complete disaster,” he said, laughing. “He hadn’t been flying on the computer.”

Being involved in the hobby when young can have huge payoffs later, he said.

“When I was 7, I was building planes and needed to figure some things out, so I went to my teacher and he showed me some formulas,” Apostolico said. “Ten years later in high school, we started learning trig – and I realized I’d been doing trig for 10 years. You can learn math, woodworking, painting, soldering, electronics, patience.”