The plane that Fay is flying is the Gee Bee racer. The G B stands for the Granville Brothers who first created the aircraft as an air racing plane in 1931.

I got the idea for the remote controlled plane from a documentary I watched on Tesla by PBS a while back. It was an excellent program, I highly recommend it. In that program there was a segment about a device that Tesla said would end the need for wars. He brought out a small boat that was only a couple feet long and set it in the water, and to the amazement of the onlookers, the boat started moving around the water by itself, turning, and stopping and starting. They even made Tesla open up the boat to prove there wasn’t a little man inside. Tesla had been controlling the boat using radio waves. Of course now this technology has its place in war in the form of the Predator drone system, or remote controlled bomb robots, but it took decades for people to accept the idea of radio controlled devices as anything other than a toy.