This year at the Fall Festival, Pumpkin Patch, and Corn Maze, Barton Hill Farms takes to the skies!
San Antonio’s Tri City Flyers will be here on the farm throughout the third weekend of October. Make sure to bring your sunglasses, because you’re going to be looking straight up!
Remote Controlled Model Airplanes at Barton Hill Farms
While we’re pretty dialed in to the farm side of STEM, we know that there’s no end to the fun hobbies and fulfilling careers in science and technology. Still, when we connected to the flying enthusiasts at Tri City Flyers, we were blown away by how much there was to learn about this pastime!
This year, we’ve invited the Tri City Flyers out to the farm on October 2nd and 3rd to share their passion with us and with you. They’ll be setting up an RC plane display booth, so you can see these fearless flyers up close. These are no tinker toys. They’re bigger than you’d think! Some of these planes have six or seven foot wingspans, or bigger! Experienced pilots will be on hand to share the details about their hobby and their club.
Then, they’ll show us all what these amazing not-so-little planes can do. We’ve built a special model airplane airstrip just for the occasion! It’s 500 feet long and it’s been pre-tested to ensure a smooth takeoff.
Meet the Tri City Flyers
The Tri City Flyers are a model aviation club based out of the San Antonio area. These airplane enthusiasts meet on airfields in Seguin and Kingsbury, TX to do what they love—send their planes soaring! From these two spots, the members of the club fly their planes and dig into the minutiae of aerodynamics and wing design, weight and balance, batteries and chargers, and more.
The club is a local charter of the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), which is the world’s largest model aviation association. They have 165,000 members over 2,500 clubs across the United States! Interested in joining? You can test it out with a three-month membership, and they also have adult and junior rates. You can’t join the Tri City Flyers unless you’re already a member of the AMA!
Why Model Airplanes?
If you’re not a flyer, you may not be familiar with this hobby (or obsession, as some members might say.) It’s an exciting combination of science and stem, social activity, and the great outdoors. Flyers get together with fellow enthusiasts on a beautiful day, head out to the airfield, and set their (often handmade) creations free!
There are also competitions to keep things lively. The AMA hosts the National Aeromodeling Championships each year. And the FAI World Championships holds categories in radio controlled aerobatics, helicopters, soaring, gliders, and more.
There are competitions for young flyers too, like the UAS4STEM event that lets you build a drone and complete a pre-set mission. It’s highly STEM-focused, with participants working on flight plans, analyzing data, and demonstrating their flight skills. The top-scoring teams get to go to an in-person international competition to compete for the grand prize!
These RC airplanes can get expensive, with high-end models going for thousands of dollars. But you get started in the hobby for much less. Introductory planes can be bought for under $100, so you and your family can practice those gentle takeoffs and soft landings without a big investment.
If you decide to take up this hobby, be prepared for it to take over the garage. Weekends will fill up with trips to the airfield. There are certainly worse ways to spend a beautiful Saturday! And pictures of your planes might soon start to outnumber pictures of your kids on your phone.
See the Tri City Flyers at Barton Hill Farms!
The flyers will only be at the farm for one weekend, so don’t miss it! On October 16th and 17th, you can meet the members, ask all your questions, and watch them take to the skies with their aircrafts.
All tickets to the farm must be purchased in advance, so get yours now to ensure they don’t sell out!
Get festival tickets for October 16th
Get festival tickets for October 17th
Or get tickets for any other Saturday or Sunday between September 25th and November 7th.
