Poked a Hole

  It happened so quickly that I'm not really sure what went wrong. My radio controlled plane went squirrely all of a sudden while over my neighbor's house. I try not to fly over peoples houses but there I was. When the plane disappeared behind their barn I heard a loud THUNK and knew that couldn't be good. My heart sank when I found my Mini Funtana embedded in the side of their house like an arrow.
   In panic, I dragged an extension ladder from their barn, climbed onto the first-level roof and clamored up to pull the remains out of their second-level siding. I peered into the hole and saw furniture. My god, I had penetrated their house.
  They heard the clatter up there and stuck their heads out the door to see if it was Santa Claus. "No, it's me! I can explain!"
  You see, the sheathing under their vinyl siding is foam board and the drywall in their upstairs bedroom had been cut away because of a project he was working on.
  Lucky for me, my neighbors are good-natured folks and took this quite well. In utter mortification, I spent a couple hours patching things up, then promised to re-side that area in the spring.
  The humiliation nearly killed me. I'll never fly over someones house again and it's unlikely I'll ever live this down.
  We brought brownies over the next night as a token of my contrition and they kept saying "It's no big deal". Well, it was a big deal to me so I grounded myself for a few days until I could figure out what had happened.
  After playing it over in my mind, I decided it was plain old pilot error. I was using a 300 watt motor on a pound and a half plane flying full throttle with the control surfaces maxed out. That's a two-to-one power to weight ratio and yes, I was hot-dogging when things went funny. I instinctively pulled up to get away from the house. But the thing is, the plane was inverted at that moment so up meant down and you know the rest.

  They are great neighbors. My acreage is wooded but theirs is open so in the summer they let me mow a landing strip in their big field. They say they enjoy watching me fly from their back windows or porch. Sometimes in winter I shovel a landing strip on my frozen pond but they complained they can't see the planes from there. I'll bet they're rethinking that now.