This is a little R/C helicopter for indoor flight; what I find amazing is the level of technology. Until now, my firm belief and experience was that remote controlled flying devices were fragile and required repair after every crash. The Blade somehow defies this wisdom. It weighs only an ounce, looks like it would shatter if you sneezed on it, and yet it has taken numerous full-speed crack-ups without the slightest problem. Nothing breaks, nothing bends, nothing requires reseating or realignment. I suppose it is made of carbon fiber. I regard it as a small modern miracle. I've had hours of fun steering it around our two-storey living room.

As a young nebbish, I got out of an obsessed hobby building model aircraft because the next level, radio control, involved extremely expensive control gear - about $500 worth at a minimum. So I moved on to other things, and a year or two later the electronics revolution brought 4-channel systems down to about $150. Too late...

The height of obsession at that time was the then-new RC helicopters, which were fearsomely expensive to build (about $2,000 with the required 6-channel controller) and required hours of careful flight training, usually with three assistants holding taut control sticks (like fishing poles with a line attached to the craft) to stabilize it while you learned not to screw up too badly.

I am not sure what to think of these $50 toy helicopters that, while constructed of cheesier material than the hand-crafted stuff, can be flown by a first-timer and are highly crash-resistant. As well as crash-damage resistant.

Kind of like blue and white LEDs. At the time I got out of electronics, blue LEDs were extremely expensive, weak and fragile - the exotickest of the exotic. Now every two-dollar gizmo has a half-dozen of them, and you can wow the youngsters by using something retro-zotic like... yellow! (White LEDs? Didn't exist until my electronics bench was a full inch deep in dust. I could have used those, back when...)

I still have a r/c plane in the basement that crashed on its maiden flight and has been awaiting repair for 3 years. There's something to be said for convenience...