GOOD NEIGHBORS: CARL SCHNEIDER
OTOW R/C Flyers members with President Carl Schneider (center in red shirt) on the runway
Flying High
Carl Schneider, the president of the On Top of the World R/C Flyers, has spent a lifetime in the sky and helping send people to space. By JoAnn Guidry • Photos by Steve Floethe
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n a clear-blue-sky afternoon at the On Top of the World R/C Flyers airfield, two model planes—one orange and white with its signature gas-powered drone and one a silent sleek gray electric—each take their radio-controlled patterns like hawks on a gentle current. Their R/C Flyers owners take turns bringing the planes in for precision landings on the asphalt runway. The model planes taxi in and when they coast to a stop, you half expect the little model pilots inside to disembark. For Carl Schneider, there’s no better place he’d rather be than spending time at a flying field. If Schneider took a DNA test, the results would definitely show that he inherited the flying gene. “My father was a barnstormer pilot in the 1920s-30s. He put on flying shows and even owned a flying school,” says Schneider, 76, smiling. “I grew up sitting on his lap in the cockpit of his planes.”
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Samuel Schneider, Carl’s father, was also a sought-after training pilot. He was recruited by the Army Air Force to train pilots, including British Royal Air Force cadets, at Riddle Field in Clewiston, Florida, from 1941-1945. Thanks to that assignment, Carl is actually a native Floridian, having been born there. Samuel Schneider eventually became a flight instructor at nearby Fort Rucker in Dothan, Alabama, the Army Aviation War-Fighting Center. And Carl soon found the inspiration that would shape the rest of his life. “I was a sophomore in high school and in class on May 5, 1961, when it was announced over the school’s P.A. system that astronaut Alan Shepard had become the first American to be launched into space,” says Schneider. “Well, that was a key moment in my life. It sparked my imagination and made me want to have a career in aerospace. I actually wanted to be an
OCALA’S GOOD LIFE retirement redefined
astronaut, but I wore glasses and then you couldn’t be an astronaut if you wore glasses.” But Schneider didn’t let that setback stop him from having an aerospace career. Not one single bit. While attending the University of Alabama, he became an intern at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. “I worked in Werner Von Braun’s organization, designing and hot-fire testing the F-1 Engines used on the Apollo Program’s Saturn V rocket,” says Schneider, who was at Marshall Space Flight Center from 1964-68. “It was an incredible start to my aerospace career.” SCHNEIDER GRADUATED FROM UA in 1968 with a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering and his career took off, well, like a rocket. He moved to southern California when recruited by Rocketdyne Corporation to develop and improve F-1 rocket engine performance
