VERO BEACH — When Stan Molin first asked the city to let his buddies fly model planes in the park, he was not the president of anything. There wasn’t even a club. They were a group of men, the youngest 60 and the oldest 90, wanting to pursue a pastime from their youths.
One written complaint was driving them out of their grassy field in Riverside Park where for decades, the men gathered in the morning like boys heading out to play.
The complainant, Ralph Cataldo, claimed that twice, he and his wife had been buzzed by a fast, gas-powered model plane as they walked along the park’s edge.
Molin, 80, gets a skeptical look. Their planes, he says, are electric, not gas.
Molin knows about these toys. He’s been playing with model airplanes for 70 years. He also knows about planes. He’s a former Eastern Airlines captain.
His own boy flew model planes, and eventually big planes too. Sten Molin, 34, was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 that crashed in Queens, N.Y., just after take-off from Kennedy Airport.
It was two months after 9/11. All 260 on board died along with five people on the ground.
Stan Molin knows all about government panels, and risk. He sat through a four-day hearing in Washington, D.C., as experts tried to determine what caused the plane’s tail to fall off.
Molin feels the hearing itself went terribly wrong. The finding mostly blamed his son’s use of the rudder control pedals.
Lawsuits have been settled, including Molin’s own against Airbus. But the controversy was not laid to rest.
Molin, who read reams of technical reports, maintains to this day what failed was the design of those pedals and the rudder’s unexpected hypersensitivity.
“When they made their rulings, I got pissed off,” he says. “They said my son is the cause by using the rudder pedals too aggressively. That starts to make a blind end to any further discussion.”
There is no doubting this: in the investigation’s wake, Stan Molin has yet to emerge from turbulence.
“It’s not something I’ve closed my past on.”
In comparison, the Vero Beach hearings on model airplanes have been child’s play.
On a clear blue day in Riverside Park, Molin’s model Piper J-3 Cub stands out like a yellow caution sign against the sky.
Rightly so. Model planes are fast – Molin flies them up to 60 mph. They are agile, but maneuvering is challenging, harder than flying a real Cub, he says.
One new flier at Riverside is a 90-year-old retired United Airlines pilot, who took up the hobby after losing his wife a few months ago.
“I gave him my plane to fly and he had it up maybe 14 seconds,” says Molin.
Caution was far from Molin’s mind the first time he flew in a real Piper Cub near the Buffalo, N.Y., airport. For $2, a pilot took him for a 15-minute joy ride.
A few weeks later, he plunked down $300 for a Piper Cub of his own. He was 17.
“No electric starter, you had to turn the prop with your hands.” Molin’s father died when he was 8. By the time he started flying lessons, his mother had no idea what he was up to. When his instructor let him solo, and discovered he didn’t have a student license, Molin rushed home with the paperwork.
“I said, here, Mom, you have to sign this. The flight instructor just let me solo illegally.”
It was 1949. When the summer ended, he sold the plane for a $50 profit and paid his first semester’s tuition at the University of Buffalo.
There, he met his wife Rhoda, his “flying buddy” as he puts it, in his 50 cross-country hours for a commercial license.
When he became a flight instructor, he ran a flight school at the Buffalo Airport until, in the mid-1960s, he was hired by Eastern Airlines.
Meanwhile, he introduced his own kids to model planes. His son was a major fan. From model planes, Sten Molin quickly went to real ones.
“I taught my son how to fly,” says Molin.
Molin was living in Greenwich, Conn., at the time of the Airbus crash.
He was taking his granddaughter – his daughter’s daughter – to breakfast when the news came over the radio.
“By the time I got to the restaurant, it was clear that it was my son’s flight.” Through it all, his fascination with flying has endured.
With the model plane controversy, Molin’s gang has started drawing spectators to the park. One is Lin Reading, a former human resources director who runs a cancer support group. A swim coach, she volunteers on the city’s Recreation Commission.
When word came to the commission in April that the city attorney had drafted an ordinance banning model planes, Reading couldn’t figure out why.
“They wanted us to give this our stamp of approval, but it just didn’t seem right to change people’s lives without any investigation,” she says. “I asked the city attorney, ‘Have you gone down and seen what these guys do at the park? Because if you didn’t do your homework, shame on you.’”
Ralph Cataldo, who wrote the city to complain, says he was twice “buzzed” by model planes. He says many of the fliers practice dives “right above individuals walking, running, women pushing strollers, etc.”
“I have shouted many times to keep their planes over the green area…” he wrote. “Of course this just invited them to fly above my head even more.”
“This is the first complaint that we’re aware of,” says Molin. “We’ve been doing this for 20 years.”
But the caution flag had already been dropped by Vice Mayor Craig Fletcher, a fellow model plane enthusiast.
These planes can be dangerous, he told other council members. City liability was great.
Once Reading learned of the issue, she stopped by the park on her morning walks.
With the sun still low behind them in the morning sky, she watched the men with their planes, soaring, looping and diving silently over the vast empty field.
A trickle of joggers and strollers ringed the perimeter, well out of the planes’ way.
“These people are very respectful if there’s anybody else in the area,” says Reading. “They only fly from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. And they don’t fly if there’s an event.”
Later, she called Molin with suggestions on how to make his case.
“He wasn’t just going to go home and not do something about it, like so many people would do.”
When Molin next appeared before the city, his group had a name: The Quiet Birds of Vero Beach. Molin was its first president. He said each flier carried $2.5 million in insurance, and their new club was taking out a separate $2.5 million insurance policy that names the city as policy holder.
Why not let the men have their fun, Reading asked her fellow commissioners.
“She used the term ‘knee-jerk reaction,’” says Molin. “I was almost jumping out of my seat waving my arm with a thumbs-up, saying, ‘Go, go, go, girl!’”
When the Recreation Commission finally got around to a vote, though, Reading’s was the only one opposed to the ordinance.
In the meantime, though, city recreation officials asked to talk to Molin privately. Somehow, their three-hour conversation cleared the air.
On Tuesday, the Vero Beach City Council passed the ordinance. Molin said he was at peace with the new law.
“I’ve given them sort of my blessings. The police need some kind of teeth to stop the rogue fliers.”
Molin said City Manager Jim O’Connor, “looked him in the eye” and indicated the club can get a special exemption from the new law.
“They told us, ‘Don’t stop flying.’”
