Doc Remote Control Plane

The tri-motor was moving now. The tail was up, preliminary to taking off. Faster and faster it raced across the tarmac. It slowly took the air.

Without banking to either side, climbing gently, the big all-metal plane flew possibly a mile.

An astounding thing happened then.

The tri-motor ship seemed to turn instantaneously into a gigantic sheet of white-hot flame. This resolved into a monster ball of villainous smoke. Then flipped fragments of the plane and its contents rained downward upon the roofs of Jackson Heights, a conservative residential suburb of New York City.

So terrific was the explosion that windows were broken in the houses underneath, and shingles even torn off roofs.

No piece more than a few yards in area remained of the great plane. Indeed, the authorities could never have identified it, had not the airport men known it had just taken off from there.

No human life could have survived aboard the tri-motor aircraft.

DOC Savage merely blinked his golden eyes once after the blinding flash which marked the blast that annihilated the tri-motor ship.

"That was what I was afraid of!" he said dryly.

The rush of air thrown by the explosion caused his plane to reel. Doc stirred the controls expertly to right it.

For Doc and his men had not been in the ill-fated tri-motor plane. They were in the other craft which had flown over the airport a moment before the tri-motor took off. Indeed, Doc himself had maneuvered the take-off of the tri-motor, using remote radio control to direct it.

Doc's radio remote control apparatus was exactly the same type used by the army and navy in extensive experiments, employing changing frequencies and sensitive relays for its operation.

Doc did not know how their mysterious enemy had managed to blow up the tri-motor. But thanks to his foresight, Doc's men had escaped the devilish blast. Doc had used the tri-motor plane for a decoy. It was one of his old ships, almost ready to be discarded, anyway.

- The Man of Bronze (1933) Chapter 7