​Mitch is a Polk County native. He knows just about everyone and pretty much everyone in the county knows Mitch or at the very least one of his relatives. Think Stott’s Garage, Stott’s Corner, Stott’s Ford, and his dad, Bobby Joe Stott owned Stott’s Chevrolet, which for years sat on the NC-SC state line.
 
By age 13 Mitch was working after school and summers as an auto mechanic at Stott’s Garage on Landrum Road. But even before that he was training as a mechanic. Some of his earliest memories are of assembling plastic models and taking apart and putting back together just about anything he could get his hands on. And all of these years later, Mitch is a professional mechanical engineer and he rightfully boasts that he’s self-trained. 

There are a lot of stories you could get from Mitch, but this short story will touch on just two. For six years Mitch was a professional drag racer and was named one of the Top 100 drivers of all time by Drag Illustratedmagazine in 2015. He was picked for this honor for being the first to break the 6-second threshold of racing a drag car on a quarter-mile track in Darlington in 2003. With Mitch in the driver’s seat and crew chief Ted Chavarria on hand, their car reached a speed of 231 mph to make the quarter-mile in 5.985 seconds. This time is still hailed as a milestone and the record itself held for several more years.

As Mitch was transitioning out of the racing world full time into other things, he found he had more free time to enjoy other hobbies. One of those was flying remote control planes. In 2008 while Mitch was flying one of his planes he found himself a bit frustrated with how the pneumatic landing gears were or in some cases were notworking. The gears started turning in Mitch’s head and all of that mechanical engineering and his incredible sense of how things work caused the proverbial light bulb to turn on in his head. He felt he could design and engineer electrically operated landing gears that would be reliable every time. The commonly used landing gears remote control planes use are pneumatic and depend on air pressure. They’re prone to leaks and other issues and the air tank has to constantly be replenished. So what often happens is the landing gear might deploy but there’s not enough air to keep it locked in place. The remote control plane, not an inexpensive item at all, comes in for a crash landing. 

Mitch set out to see if he could turn his hobby into his next profession. He solicited the help of a former crewmember of his, Ron Word, to help him come up with the electronic module that would be needed to run electric landing gears. Ron said he was pretty sure he could do this and in 2008 the two of them started “Down and Locked,” the business that would make a difference for model plane pilots across the world. Mitch had since bought out Ron’s share of the business and operates it today out of the end of a real airplane hangar tucked away in Green Creek that sits adjacent to Mitch and Joyce’s home. Yes, Mitch does fly real planes himself and has held a private pilot’s license for years. There aren’t many people who have a 1,700-foot airstrip next to their house.

Down and Locked is an amazing small business that remote control pilots all over the world depend for safe landings. It’s fair to say most people in Polk County have no clue this business exists. Mitch’s product is in remote control planes all across the world where people fly RC planes. His shop is filled with UPS boxes of all sizes ready to ship his product. It is an engineering marvel, but there’s also a constant battle to keep up and on top of competition. Cheap products out of China are an issue just like it is for thousands of US companies. Mitch cautions people that you get what you pay for with those cheaper imports. He stands behind his landing gears and other custom designed model plane parts. Mitch talks about the importance of customer service and that’s something a would-be user is not going to get when ordering a cheap part from overseas. The day I went over for the interview I could see Mitch’s customer service in action. While I was taking photos Mitch was making multiple phone calls on behalf of a customer who was in Florida to fly in a competition. The customer needed a replacement part and needed it that day. Normally, Down and Locked would have picked and shipped the part overnight even if they had to do a custom machining of it. But the pilot needed the part now, not tomorrow, so Mitch was calling one shop after another to see if he could get a machine shop in the area of the competition to machine this small $3 part to Mitch’s specifications so the pilot could get his plane back in the air and back in competition.