My Dad flying the remote control plane he and Mom bought me for Christmas. It was controlled via a handle with something like fishing line? He took it in a circle about 5-6 time til a line snapped and it went straight into the ground. (I had yet to fly it) We picked up the pieces and went home. In the car he said, stick with the trains.
Last time I ever saw that plane! 
I got a control-line model plane for Christmas, too. It must have been around 1960, when I was twelve. It was pretty slick: a Douglas Dauntless, with an actual dropping bomb that was released by a separate cord. Power was a Wen-Mac .049 engine. No sissy electric motors for flying model planes in those days!
I actually got pretty good at flying it, and had a lot of fun. Dad would drive me down to an open field near the river, where I could fly without running into anything or driving the neighbors batty (model plane gas engines, for those who've never been near one, are noisy).
My days in aerial combat, though, were numbered. One morning, as I was standing there turning in a circle to put the Dauntless through its maneuvers, a stiff gust of northerly wind got under its wings. The control lines went slack, and, out of my control altogether, it went into dive-bombing mode for real -- directly at me.
There was no time to make a run for it (the control lines were only about twenty feet long). Instinctively, I hit the dirt. According to witnesses who reported afterward, the Dauntless made its power dive and zoomed by, just inches over my head, which was pressed firmly into the grass.
It bounced once, and nosed into the ground about ten feet from me, stalling the engine but coming to rest on its wheels.
I gradually lost interest in control-line planes after that. The plane lives on in my mother's attic, but it was pretty much the end of my aviation career.
