This reminds me of the R/C model airplanes of my youth.

They were not "proportional".   They had a single channel that controlled the rudder.  As you pulsed the transmitter the plane's rudder went from "center" to "full right" to "center" to "full left" to "center".   As they got more sophisticated the rudder went in half-steps, but basically the same cycle.

As long as the (gas) engine was running they gracefully climbed, and once the engine ran out of fuel then (hopefully) gracefully glided down.   Sometimes it was not so graceful.   Many times they ended up in trees.

The receiver used a tube and a very heavy battery.   The planes typically had a five or six foot wingspan, the fuselage was close to six feet long.
The transmitter power leads clipped to your car battery.   They would fly from five to ten minutes, limited mostly by the gas tank size and battery life of the receiver.

There were a couple of guys who built these (the rest of the hobbyists, my brother included) flew control-line planes.....

I never built one (I could not afford it), and so I more or less ignored R/C until thirty years later.   All of a sudden there were IC based proportional R/C radios with more channels than a Sony TV that (seemingly) were about the size of a dime and could control these cute cars, boats, airplanes, heliocopters, all for less than 25 bucks.

Yowsir!

md