Halftime AeroHeroes
By: Jack Purdy, BA 22 | Categories: Tech History
Before LED light shows or the flag corps, Georgia Tech football halftime performances in the late 1940s to early 1950s featured a mini air show with control-line airplanes. The planes predated remote control toy vehicles.
“It’s a hobby that was really big in the ’40s and ’50s, and to some extent, the ’60s,” says Mat Waites, MS ICS 81, whose father, Bill Waites, AE 55, piloted the planes at Tech after spending his childhood flying them.
The planes are powered with a glow plug engine that requires heat from an external battery to start the engine. Once powered, the planes are steered with two wires (hence the name, control line) by its pilot on the ground.
As a pandemic-era hobby, Waites restored his father’s control-line airplane, replacing the wood and fabric that made up the body of the plane, which helps the sturdiness of the plane.
“The body of the plane is solid sheets of balsa wood. The wings are covered with heavy paper that’s like the cloth used to make a tea bag,” Waites says.
During performances at Georgia Tech, two planes were often flown at halftime in formation performing simple stunts. One plane was the Yellow Jacket, and the other would be painted to represent the opposing team. Two planes were used not only for the performance, but also in case one broke down and couldn’t fly.
According to an account that the late Bob Barton, AE 56, one of the control-line pilots, wrote for the Living History Program, “it became superstition that if the Yellow Jacket didn’t fly, Tech would lose the football game. When something like this happened, you can imagine the elation of the opponent’s fans.”
The grand finale of the performance was the Yellow Jacket taking down the opposing plane.
In 2023, Mat Waites donated his father’s plane to the Georgia Tech Archives, where it currently resides.
