Written by AMA staff (06/2014); reformatted by JS (06/2014)
A Modeling Life Aftin “Rocky” Doughty 1929-2014 The Beginning Rocky was born in Maine at the beginning of the Great Depression, and started modeling during the 1940s using materials at hand such as tissue boxes.
He learned he had a mechanical aptitude when he served in the 501st AAA Gun Battalion in Karlsruhe Germany during the Korean War. While working as an automobile mechanic, and then in automotive sales, he kept up his hobby during nights and weekends in the basement. He graduated to modeling stock cars raced at the local Beech Ridge speedway, military vehicles, and the occasional WWII aircraft.
Rocky welcomed his son home from the hospital after a tonsillectomy with an assembled and painted 1/14-scale Guillow’s Albatros DVA hung from the bedroom ceiling. He found inspiration in plastic and Guillow’s kits, and began to make planes from scratch from plans which he drafted himself in the same 1/14-scale.
Rocky in his workshop
The birthday gift of a proportional divider from
Germany helped his transition to scaling up plans from the aircraft profile series books, creating 1/6-scale radio controlled aircraft, which he sought to make more historically accurate over time.
Albatros D.V.
Competition
He competed with himself in his passion for the historical accuracy of his scratch-built, 1/6scale, balsa WWI and WWII aircraft models. He used books, color plates, and sometimes purchased plans to use in modeling and for casting machine guns or display motors. These models could be flown, but they did not fly as well as the kit models because his goal was to achieve the correct, historical proportions, eschewing the alterations required to meet the aerodynamic requirements of RC flight.
Although he religiously attended his local Propsnappers Club Fun Flys, and was frequently a judge, he would use a practice plane for his own flying and enlist more skilled flyers in his club to fly his better planes for him. He had been a member of the Academy of Modeling Aeronautics since 1973. He would build models on commission, using the proceeds toward his hobby. In the mid-1980s, he took a sabbatical from airplanes to spend three years of steady work constructing a 1/24-scale model of the 32-gun frigate, the USS Raleigh (the first ship built in the PNSY as a United States ship). It is now displayed in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyards Museum’s ship. He often said he built it “to see whether I could do it!”
A stroke in 2006 ended his modeling career as he was working on his first jet, a Heinkel HE-162.
Commissioned Vought OS2U Kingfisher
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