Model airplane history-maker Maynard Hill dies at the age of 85

Everyone lost heart, including Mr. Hill. But the plane — dubbed the Spirit of Butts Farm — eventually reappeared on tracking devices and flew steadily, arriving at its designated target on Ireland’s west coast after 38 hours and 52 minutes of flight. Members of the U.S.-based Academy of Model Aeronautics were there to guide it to a safe landing via radio control.

“In the model airplane world, this is no different from Armstrong landing on the moon,” Carl Layden, an official observer of the feat, told the Baltimore Sun at the time.

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( Michael Lutzky / THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Maynard Hill holds one of the planes he designed to cross the Atlantic. (Photo by Michael Lutzky/The Washington Post)

Mr. Hill heard news of the landing by phone. Less than two ounces of fuel — a whiskey shot’s worth — remained in the plane’s tank. “I just grabbed my wife, hugged her and cried like a baby,” he said. “I’m an emotional guy.”

Maynard Luther Hill was born Feb. 21, 1926, in the Pennsylvania coal town of Lehighton. He grew up admiring Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart but was always more fascinated by tiny airplanes than their full-sized counterparts.

“By age 9,” he once wrote, “I had acquired a fairly serious addiction to balsa wood and glue.”

He joined the Navy after graduating from high school in 1943 and served in Panama during World War II.

After the war, Mr. Hill earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in metallurgy, from Pennsylvania State University.

He was singing in a choir at Penn State when he met Gay Brunner, a fellow singer. They were married in 1951. On Day 3 of their honeymoon, he later said, “I told my wife I just had to go out and get some balsa and glue.”

Besides his wife of 59 years, survivors include three children, Christopher H. Hill of Santa Fe, N.M., Vivian Snipes of Lexington, Ky., and M. Scott Hill of Hurlock, Md.; a brother; a sister; and 10 grandchildren.

Mr. Hill was inducted into the Model Aviation Hall of Fame in 1977. Several of his planes, including the Spirit of Butts Farm, are on display at the National Model Aviation Museum in Muncie, Ind. Another plane, a backup for the transatlantic effort, is in the National Air and Space Museum’s collection.

“It used to be we said we wanted to be famous,” Mr. Hill told The Washington Post in 2001, in the midst of his five-year marathon effort to build an ocean-crossing plane. “Now, it’s just the actual joy of putting it together and making it work and knowing that you had the brains to do all that.”