Been doing this about fifteen years now. The first guy to do VTOL was Rhet Radford from Jacksonville, FL. who used the Max Headroom X-Wing. I think it was featured in RCM and Model Airplane News. He never used gyro-stabilizers, which made it amazing even by todays' standards. He used to launch by hand. He had a heli skid mounted to the fuselage. He flew single stick and watching him catch the plane was inspiring.
After Bob Violett started packaging carbon fiber products the high power-to-weight ratio planes became more prevalent and now nearly every R/C field has somebody doing this.
