I was born about five decades too late for the "Golden Age" of flight - that period in the 1930s when the public's fascination with aviation rivaled its interest in the Internet today.

Had I been around then, I'm sure my life would have centered on a leather jacket, goggles and the open cockpit of a speedy pylon plane. But my name isn't Lindbergh or Doolittle, and so my lust for the wild blue is focused on airplanes of a much smaller scale.

They're radio-controlled(RC), and every Sunday at a field in Parkton, I put one through its paces in the company of other RC pilots, including Bill Patalon, a Northrop Grumman engineer who does double duty as my father and best friend.

Those Sundays are always fun, even when the hard ground inexplicably jumps into my flight path, turning a balsa wood labor of love into a pile of matchsticks.

But on this particular Sunday, we leave our own planes, fuel cans and toolboxes at home and stop at a Harford County soccer field for something different - a test flight of a new Hobbyzone "Fighterbird," an electric-powered model plane known as a "parkflyer."

These inexpensive aircraft, easy to fly and hard to damage, are bringing thousands of new pilots into the RC world - people who might otherwise be scared off by the expense, difficulty and hours of painstaking assembly that traditional, fuel-powered RC planes require.

After just a few minutes, it's obvious why parkflyer sales are soaring: Out of the box, we charge the battery, attach the high-impact foam wing to the fuselage with rubber bands, and we're ready for takeoff.

I push up on the transmitter's left-hand control stick, hear the Fighterbird's electric motor rev into a buzzing zing, and nod to Dad, who tosses the gull-winged, silver bird of prey directly into the wind.

I'm flying.

Dad shouts encouragement - or perhaps edicts - but after a couple of over-controlled wobbles, I have that shark-mouthed baby circling the field in a graceful, ever-widening arc. The thrill is no less profound than it was the first time I soloed a fuel-powered bird.

And even though I ultimately land the airplane 80 feet up in a tree (Note to Dad: Your instructions came a millisecond too late), I understand the parkflyer's burgeoning popularity.

Now don't get me wrong. I still prefer the growling, fuel-powered RC planes that have dominated the sport since they first appeared in the late 1930s.

And there are quite a few of us. The national Academy of Model Aeronautics, an umbrella organization that promotes the sport, organizes competitions and serves as sanctioning body, has more than 200,000 members, according to spokesman Tom Schwyn.

Tom Atwood, editorial director for Air Age Media, which publishes magazines for the modeling community, estimates that as many as 500,000 Americans have been involved in the sport at some point.

But the planes we normally fly are tricky for newcomers. The glow-plug engines are finicky. They fly so fast (and some are so large) that they require a sanctioned RC field like the Parkton site operated by my club, the Radio Control Modelers of Baltimore.

A complete fuel-based trainer airplane package starts at $300 for small models (which still require some assembly). The price can rise into thousands for larger planes with wingspans of 12 feet or more.

Beginners need an instructor, and even among experienced pilots, a bad landing or missed maneuver can result in a week's worth of aircraft repairs - or burial in the trash barrel that adorns every RC model field.

All this is fine with Dad and me, since we enjoy the club's camaraderie, know that crashes are part of the hobby, and like the excuse to hang out. But newcomers may be scared off by all these concerns - hence the parkflyer. As its name implies, it's designed to fly in a park, athletic field, or even an unobstructed back yard. Most are electric-powered, fly slowly, and are built to take a licking and keep on, well, flying.

"It's always been a goal of ours [for the customer] to have a successful flight the first time out," says Steven W. Goodreau, a spokesman for Horizon Hobby Inc. (www.horizonhobby .com), which manufactures the Fighterbird we tried and a full line of entry level parkflyers that start at less than $100. "The sales have grown every year."

Newcomers can start cold, learn to fly and work their way up, he said.

Lou Bertazon, owner of Hunt Valley Hobby Shop in Cockeysville, said parkflyers are the fastest-growing part of his RC plane business.

At Air Age Media, Atwood said the trial issue of a magazine aimed strictly at parkflyers was so successful that the company quickly turned it into a bimonthly.

Until recently, he added, RC planes have been available only through hobby shops, catalogs and on the Internet. But now parkflyers are starting to appear in mass-market retailers, which should make them even more popular.

Hobbyzone's entry-level plane is the $90 Firebird II, followed by the Firebird XL ($120), the Fighterbird ($150) and the aerobatic Aerobird ($170). Each plane comes with a battery pack, charger, transmitter, an instructional manual and video.

Starter airplanes use a two-channel transmitter, which means pilots need to master only two controls: the throttle, which makes the plane climb or dive, and the V-shaped tail, which makes it turn.

The Aerobird features three channels (elevator, power and rudder), while hotshot, fuel-powered aircraft use as many as nine channels and controls.

We were smitten with the Fighterbird, which sets its gun sights right on the video game crowd. As its name implies, you can actually dogfight with another Fighterbird.

Slung beneath the plane's fuselage is a "sonic combat module," which sends out a sonic beam, just like a TV-remote clicker. Get on a rival's tail, pull the trigger, and you can "shoot" him down (or get shot down yourself). The loser glides to the ground.

Goodreau said he and his friends have dogfights before or after their league softball games. Like an aerial version of High Noon, the planes scream at each other - one from home plate and the other from centerfield.

My interest in parkflyers was piqued by Steve Stricker, a former world aerobatics champion from Sparks who brought a GWS Tiger Moth parkflyer to our field. While we ate hot dogs, Stricker put on an amazing aerial display, concluding with a landing approach so slow and controlled that the yellow-and-black biplane was snatched right out of the air.

"These airplanes are cheap, they fly really well, and they fly right out of the box," Stricker said. "I didn't even read the instructions. I just threw it up and flew it. The grief-to-fun ratio is really great."

That's quite an endorsement. Stricker, 41, is the RC equivalent of a Top Gun. A licensed pilot and an engineer at AAI Corp. in Cockeysville, Stricker helps develop and test military UAVs - unmanned aerial vehicles. These drones, essentially RC airplanes on steroids, have become famous for flying dangerous reconnaissance missions over the Persian Gulf region and other trouble spots.

In 1996 Stricker won the Tournament of Champions (the Wimbledon of RC aerobatics) and he's finished second three times.

Now he's been bitten by the parkflyer bug. His latest acquisition is the new GWS P-51 Mustang, a parkflyer modeled after the sleek World War II fighter.

"As soon as I saw it," he said, "I had to have it."

The next step? According to Atwood at Air Age Media, advances in electronics will result in planes so small and controllable that they'll find an entirely new venue.

"The market is booming now because of the backyard flyers and parkflyers," he said. "But there's going to be a [new] market of indoor fliers. The hobby is riding the technological wave."