Posted on February 8, 2007 12:18 PM by chadley
When I was in the Marine Corps, I belonged to a unit named 1st Radio Battalion. Marines in that unit deployed out to different areas of the world regularly for temporary duty. Unless your temporary duty was for about 60 days or less, you had to pack up all your stuff (that you weren't taking with you) and put it in storage. I had a roommate whose name was Lou Boulden. Lou liked to put together model airplanes and then hang them from the ceiling or our room. The next time he was deployed, he left his collection of model airplanes behind, because they most likely would not have survived travel or storage.I left the planes hanging for a long time, but then I started to get grief during room inspections because the planes had a tendency to collect dust. Eventually I had to take them down. That's when I got the great idea that I should take the biggest one, a
I used an exacto knife heated with a lighter to dismantle the model enough to stuff it with the fireworks. I even replaced the pilots' seat with a seat made of firecrackers. When I was satisfied that the plane was loaded down with ordinance, I put it back together.
Later with my friend Eric Schirmer and my then girlfriend Jodie Yamada, I took the plane to a secluded area to light it up. The plan was to make a pool of lighter fluid under the plane, and light it up, as I had left a number of fuses from the fireworks hanging under the plane that would start the show.
The day we picked was pretty windy. We were located on the northern side of the island of Oahu, which is aptly named the windward side, meaning the wind blows off of the ocean onto the land on that side. After fighting the wind to keep the zippo lighter lit and the pool of lighter fluid from drying up, we finally got enough flame to get things going.
This is the mucho exciting video that resulted. If you think that the video is somewhat lame, I apologize for wasting your time, but I did edit out a lot of cursing and gnashing of teeth as we struggled to get things lit.
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Tags: fireworks, model airplanes, video