Hi, this is Paul Naton, founder of Radio Carbon Art and producer of all of the DVDs on this site. I've been flying R/C gliders since about 1988, and my passion for flying sailplanes has only grown more obsessive over the years. I started making and selling glider films in 1998, and I have grown my production company Radio Carbon Art into a full time business distributing my entertainment and instructional films all over the world. Let me tell you a little about myself, how I got into making glider movies, and my goals for Radio Carbon Art. 

 

   I've had a 'thing' about airplanes since I can remember. My dad had a lot of airplane books on the bookshelf, and anything that flew in the air was fascinating to me. Some of the books were about gliders, my favorite filled with pictures of German sailplanes of the 1930's soaring the Wasserkuppe.

 

  While I enjoy all types of aviation, gliding seemed the most magical and intriguing. My dad and I folded hundreds of paper planes and built countless Guillows 10 cent balsa gliders. These planes taught me the basics of aerodynamics and the importance of balance and tuning. Free flight was cool, but I always imagined being able to control my paper airplane, giving it bank just at the right moment to avoid that tree and increase the flight time by a few seconds.

 

 

   Once I was 12, I started to take full-scale glider lessons at the Fremont,California glider school and later at the Calistoga glider port. At 12, you don't have much understanding of the air, and most of the time I was in way over my head as far as piloting, but I was progressing slowly towards solo. Unfortunately, my folks split up, and there went the lessons and flying for a while.

 

   Fast forward lots of years,1984 to be exact, to my college days in the arts program at the University of California, San Diego. UCSD sits on the bluffs of the pacific coast,virtually across the street from the famous Torrey Pines glider port and it's 350 foot cliffs. I was really into surfing at the time and an afternoon wave check at cliff's edge was my routine after the days' classes. I enjoyed watching the hang gliders and local group of old guys with their big balsa R/C gliders launching out into the building sea breeze. The R/C models were fascinating to watch, but I had no money or time to get my own plane going.  'Someday', I thought to myself.

 

   One spring day in 1988, I stopped by Torrey to check out huge storm surf pounding the coast. A front had passed through and it was blowing about 25 kts. At the edge of the cliff stood a few guys flying some small gliders that were going really fast. I'd never seen anyone flying RC's in this much wind, and these guys were flying full-on aerobatics like in an air show.  This type of flying was new to me and I spent the next 3 hours watching these guys and asking questions about the gliders. One of these guys turned out to be Charlie Richadrson, then a little know sailplane designer, who was test flying his new Savaron twist-wing slope plane.

 

   Seeing these pros fly high speed aerobatics in strong winds was a life changing experience for me. That day I decided that I needed to learn how to fly like those guys. I needed something to do when the surf was flat or blown out, which is about 80% of the time even in California.

 

   I started hanging around the Torrey glider pits observing the pilots fly and asking a million questions. My first stick time was on a guys' Gentle Lady which was 3 mistakes high. I quickly got the hang of turning, applying my full scale experience to the model. I went out and bought a Kyosho Melody, which turned out to be a terrible trainer, and tried to teach myself to fly by gliding it off of the small cliffs in Del Mar. After a week of crash landings on the beach and nightly repairs, I had some control of the model, enough to try the big cliff on the next windy day. That day came, and yes, I had a long successful flight in real slope lift. I was hooked!

 

   Charlie Richardson was just starting his glider kit business, so we struck up a deal to trade some some of my graphic design time for one of his pre-built Turbo wingeron planes which I so admired. This deal started a long mentorship which I learned how to fly and build high performance gliders. After a few years of daily practice, I started competing in slope races as a member of the CR Aircraft team. Soon CR planes like the Renegade and Raider were dominating the California race circuit with both of us bringing home many trophies in the early 90's.

 

   When the wind didn't blow, Charlie worked on some innovative handlaunch glider designs. Throw for hours and go up once in a while? I thought HLG was really stupid. That was until I caught my first big thermal and climbed faster than I had ever done on the slope. Charlie's Climmax series of HLG's where the most popular planes on the contest circuit for many years, and I still own a few of these great flying designs. I get more airtime on my HLG's then any other planes I own.

 

   To promote the CR planes at trade shows, we started video taping each other flying, showing off the performance of the gliders. Our first demo videos were crude, with basic edits done with 2 VCR's hooked together with popular music over-dubbed for a soundtrack. The trade show crowds went nuts for the videos because the flying was really amazing. I had taken lots of video production classes in college, but you needed a room full of really expensive gear to do even simple video editing. I wanted to make some quality films on flying, but the technology to do so was just not affordable. That would soon change.

 

 

   Fast forward again. In 1997,I had the chance to take some serious time off and travel. I bought a VW camper, a Sony Hi8 video camera, a case of tapes, and packed my vehicle with planes and future wife Aimee and left on a no-schedule trip around North America.

 

   Now I didn't do this trip with the intention of making a soaring movie. After previewing some of the footage that we shot while flying gliders in some weird and wonderful places, I began to think about a formal film about my experiences. My inspiration was the classic surf film The Endless Summer, the story of young guys roaming the world in search of perfect waves. I was doing the same thing in essence . . . searching for perfect soaring conditions where ever they might occur, in the vastness of America.

 

   The trip was incredible, I wore out 3 planes, built 3 more in the van, and flew places with my glider that had not been flown before. How would I tell this unbelievable story to my flying buddies?

 

   I had about 20 hours of flying footage to cut together, and no way to do it. High technology to the rescue. I found this local San Diego guy who had a new Mac-based non-linear editing system, and he could edit the movie together for a fraction of the time and cost it would have taken with analog systems. He had a 20 gig hard-drive, which was huge and expensive for 1998.  After a few weeks of editing work, I had my first film done, the famous Endless Lift, first available on VHS tape.

 

   The internet age was just starting, and I sold the first copies of Endless Lift through the RC soaring exchange e-mail list. Word of mouth spread, and in a few months, had made back the production costs and a tidy profit. I was suddenly in the film business.

 

   A few years later, I made my second film, Endless Lift 2, which was a compilation of my best travels and soaring events since the Endless Lift journey. It was shot on analog Hi8 video but edited on a better quality Avid editing system. The overall quality was OK, but I was never happy with the image quality and the lack of editing control when you are on the $60.00 by-the-hour studio clock.  Again, new technology arrived, giving me a cost effective way to produce high quality films.

 

 

   The first digital video cameras and affordable computer editing systems hit about 1999, and I invested in a Canon GL-1 pro camera and a PowerPC Mac with a then huge 80 gig hard-drive. Without this new video technology and the internet to sell the final product, Radio Carbon Art would not be.

 

   Learning to shoot and edit like a filmmaker is an ongoing challenge which uses all of my talents. I do it all, shoot, edit, sound mix, create the graphics and titles, and design the marketing materials. My goal is to make each film unique and in some way better than the last.

 

  

 

   While the entertainment and travel films are a blast to make, I soon learned that the true value in making these videos was to teach others the techniques you need to know to be successful in the sport of r/c soaring.

 

   I remember the years of painful trial and error I experienced when I was learning to build and fly even though I was lucky to be among really experienced soaring pilots. If I only had a resource like my DVDs to learn from, it would have saved me years of learning. I would have bought each one!

 

   I decided to design some presentations that would be like a home study course in soaring. The first project was the Secrets of Thermal Soaring, which sold thousands of copies and its still my best-selling program.  

 

   R/C soaring is a young sport which is shaped in part by technology. We are all just learning to fly planes that have more ability than our piloting skills can match. I will keep you updated on the latest tools, technology, and piloting techniques as they evolve. My goal is to cover every aspect of the sport in detail, to build up a comprehensive library of information that you can purchase, review, and learn from at your own pace. 

 

   The new Soaring Master Class DVD series is an example of an ongoing project to bring together the knowledge of the great minds and personalities of the current soaring world. More soaring superstars will be featured in the future. I also spend a lot of time learning about and researching the latest planes and products, scouring the web for the best of the best, so watch for me teaching some future classes as well.

 

   The technology for media delivery is changing by the second, so I expect RCA will adapt to what ever is the best medium that will let you enjoy my films. DVDs are still the best solution for quality and portability, but expect streaming video or pay per view downloads to your smartphone in the future. I hope to be using High-Def soon, though it's an expensive over-kill for instructional videos. 

 

   You can use our contact form if you have any questions for me. Thanks for reading this, gotta go flying now.

 

Paul Naton

producer/owner    

Radio Carbon Art

 

Appendix 1:

What gear do we use to make the DVDs?

All Mac's of course, lots of terabytes of HD space, Final Cut Pro Suite, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Design Suite, IWork and ILife suites, and tons of other software. Two Canon video cameras, Canon Digi SLR, Sennhieser wireless mics, Mackie mixers, lipstick cams, specialty mics, and lots of coffee, delicious dark coffee. 

 

Appendix 2:

What am I flying?

Onyx JW carbon TD/F3J

Fonix F3 F3B/F3F

1/3 scale moulded Discus CS

Mach 60" Wingeron

Carbon Shrike 60" Pitcheron

CR Carbon Contender wingeron

CR Climmax polyhedral

CR Climmax Pro

CR Raider F3 slope racer

Sirius F3K Disser edition

Zoloft Slope HLG

XP-4 F3K hlg

Raptor F3K hlg

LightSpeed F3K hlg

Spirit 2M trainer

Building Que: CR Savaron - Maas Slopestream PSS

 

Second fastest time at the 1999 World Speed Trails at Kiona Butte, Wa.

Custom CR/Naton designed Speed Runner, first plane designed for Dynamic Soaring speed records. This plane set the DS record at 173 mph in 2000, a record that stood for 3 years.