Hot Birds on a Hot Day

You will have seen my earlier posts about the 1970 Mattel Hot Birds planes, the toy diecast models which were intended to extend the Hot Wheels franchise into the air. A while back I found one of the smaller playsets, the Sky Solo set, which included the means to make the models fly. Up till now, i'd never bothered to try it out, as I was more concerned about collecting the planes. But at the weekend, the sun came out and suddenly I was back in 1970 and had the urge to take advantage of the good weather.

The Hot Birds concept involved attaching the metal plane to a wire hook and sliding it down a length of nylon cable. The Sky Solo set included a plane and a handset and about 30 feet of twine. What I hadn't realised until I tried it, was the twine wasn't smooth and the wire hook rubbed along the length as the plane flew, sending vibrations back to the handset in 'cup telephone' fashion, which create a 'jet engine' whine from the device. Listen to the effect in the short video above!

 Of course it took a bit of getting used to to make the planes fly, my first attempt, attaching the cable to the gutter on the conservatory, was a failure!

The plane stalled in mid air and ground to a halt on the rough cord. I tried it with the end tethered on the wall and lifted the handset as high as possible and the plane slid happily along. Trouble was, I had to slow it down at the end to avoid crashing and chipping the precious paint!