When I was a kid in the early-'70s I had an airplane toy. There was a base about the size of a notebook with a black plastic joystick coming out of the middle of it maybe ten inches long. There were stickers on the base to simulate cockpit instruments. Mono-filament line was attached to the top, and the other end of the line was attached to a clamp with a hook on it. There was an airplane (about 1/48 scale PA-28 Cherokee, IIRC) suspended by two wires with round loops on the end to the line. The tail of the airplane attached to the hook on the clamp. The last piece was a piece of cardboard about 6" wide and three feet long that was black with a white segmented line down the middle (the runway).
When the joystick was pulled back, pulling the mono-filament line taut, the airplane would disengage from the hook on the clamp holding the other end of the line. It would then slide down toward the runway. The ‘pilot’ could move the plane up and down and left and right on its ‘glide’, and the aim was to land it on the runway.
Does anyone know who made this and what it was called?
That is indeed very close to what I had. Only mine wasn’t quite so complicated as shown here. No pulleys, just the single line going from the stick to the clamp. And the PA-28 instead of the F-4, and the differently-shaped base of course. Now that I see the illustration, mine might have had a stick to raise the level of the far end. I tied on a longer line and attached it to the top of the fence in the backyard for longer ‘flights’.
I went to your link and then to the one on that page where the guy was searching for Flight Deck. There, it said that Airfix had licensed it from Schaper; so then I googled Schaper airplane toy and there was the eBay link. I never expected to see one for sale. I wonder if my nephew would like it? (Or if the little freak would think it’s lame compared to his video games.)
I had one of those! It was kinda of a piece of junk.
James May of Top Gear had a special on BBC (you can find it online if you look) called James May’s Top Toys, whereby he talks about the best toys of his childhood (and some of the worst), and Flight Deck is one of them. He shows one of the original commercials for it, which made it look awesome, then demonstrates the actual toy - which kind of sucked.
Anyway, it’s a great show if you can find it. He talks about Airfix models, original Meccano, Etch-A-Sketch, and other toys, in a very humorous way.
Oh, I wouldn’t call it junk. But it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the commercial mad it out to be. OTOH, my dad and mom were pilots, my dad was in the FAA, my mom worked at an FBO, and I was plane crazy; so I played with it a lot. I made hangers out of paperclips and ‘flew’ other airplanes too. I remember trying to do barrel rolls too, by giving the line some slack, banking in one direction, yanking back on the stick and flipping it over to the other side. I don’t recall if I was ever successful though.
I had that as well and also the “Hairy Canary” It looked so cool on the TV commercials but every time a tried it “fly” it all I accomplished was repeated ground loops.
That reminds me of my Vertibird. The one in the video is white, but mine was red. It came with a life raft, a Mercury capsule, and an astronaut. The astronaut could be put in the life raft and ‘rescued’. The Mercury capsule was a clamshell thing, so you could put the little man inside and pull him out. There was also a cardboard square that was black with white helicopter landing pad markings.
I had a blast with it. Only this was back in the days of shag carpet, and the power was transmitted from the shaft to the rotor by a 90º spring. If I missed the landing pad or let it fall while rescuing the astronaut, the shag carpet would get caught in the spring and the helicopter would mash itself into the floor.
The Vertibird WAS a great toy. I loved mine. It was so good that after it went out of production used ones could be had on eBay for as much as $800! Prices have now dropped again, because the Vertibird is being made again (although the rights were sold to another company, which markets it as ‘chopper command’ or something like that)