Warrnambool’s Rod Mitchell has spent most of his working life in the aviation industry and his love of aeroplanes started when he was a child.
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Two of his model planes took to the skies above Koroit at the weekend for the Warrnambool Model Aircraft Club’s annual fun fly event.
“I’ve been flying radio-controlled planes since I was 15 and I was building models before that,” he said.
“I tend to design my own.”
Mr Mitchell spent three-and-a half years building a replica of a Tigercat fighter plane – an aircraft that was built for the Second World War but the conflict ended before it could be used in combat.
“Every component on it I’ve had to make. I didn’t make the wheels but all the fittings, the whole structure, is made by me,” he said.
Mr Mitchell said he was drawn to twin-engine aircraft, even though that often meant there were more engine problems than single-engine planes.
And yesterday was one of those days where he had to carefully guide his Tigercat to safety after an engine problem. “I’m very careful with these aeroplanes. If you’ve put three-and-a-half years into it, you don’t want to do something dumb,” he said.
Mr Mitchell has eight model aeroplanes, including the replica Black Widow he also flew at the weekend.
He said the real Black Widow was so fast it would often miss its target, but it seems his replica is even faster – when scale is taken into account. “I do enter competitions with it but the judges think the Widow flies too fast, so I have to slow it down.”
Mr Mitchell, who recently retired to Warrnambool, spent 20 years working in a job similar to an air traffic controller at Melbourne Airport and Broken Hill.
He recalled the day he tried to make contact with a plane that kept flying past the runway instead of landing. Eventually, a passenger on board made contact saying: “the pilot’s collapsed, I’ve regained control of the aeroplane”.
The pilot had collapsed forward onto the controls and the aircraft was plummeting towards the ground.
The passenger was a trainee pilot who just happened to be on work experience with the plane company, but didn’t know how to fly that model of aircraft. Mr Mitchell, with the help of a Royal Flying Doctor Service pilot, guided the plane to safety.
About 12 years later when Mr Mitchell went to work as a flight planner for Ansett, he ended up working alongside the pilot who’d collapsed.
Mr Mitchell lost his job when Ansett collapsed in 2001 and went to work for the air force as an aeronautical analyst.
