Hunting for... Airplanes

The DRI annual celebrity quail hunt is a pretty cool event to shoot every year. However, over the last few year the extreme drought we've been having in west Texas has been really bad for the local quail population. So, the organizers have had to come up with some different ideas of things to hunt. Normally on Fridays they do sporting clays and on Saturday afternoon they do some type of trick shooting competitions. This year they were shooting at RC planes. I was kind of nervous going into it since most of the time when I get really excited about something that sounds really cool, it ends up turning out really lame. So I headed out there with guarded optimism about the shoot.

When I got there I spoke briefly with one of the organizers and asked him about the RC planes. He just laughed and said "This is going to be really humbling for some of these guys." I knew right there this might end up being really cool after all. So, the basic idea of this is there is an RC plane with a bunch of pyrotechnic devices on the bottom of it and it flies past a team of about six shooters firing at the little plane zooming by around 60-80mph. When one of the shotgun pellets hits the plane the pyrotechnic goes off and the team scores. It was a lot of fun and the first couple of round almost no one got hits. But then towards the end some of them were really getting into the groove and getting some nice shots in. The planes aren't your typical RC planes, they're basically an engine on plastic board (that ends up looking like Swiss cheese at the end of the shoot). It was a lot of fun to shoot, both for me and the hunters.