Video: Superman Soars Over Calif. Beach

(Image Credit: Kyle Gough/Youtube)

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!

A life-size, radio-controlled model of the caped crusader was spotted flying over a beach in Carlsbad, Calif., last week.

Footage of Superman soaring over the water has since gone viral after a stunned onlooker took cell phone video and posted it to YouTube.

It turns out it wasn’t Superman’s first jaunt through the Southern California sky.

Otto Dieffenbach III, the pilot of Superman, told the San Diego Union-Tribune he has been flying different versions of the superhero, usually at a local soccer field, for a year and a half without getting much attention.

“It took a bicyclist with a cellphone [to gain notoriety],” he said. The video, which was taken by Kyle Gough, has garnered more than 300,000 views on Youtube.

 Superman isn’t the only character in the engineer’s collection.

Dieffenbach told ABC News’ San Diego affiliate KGTV he has built a dozen radio controlled characters, including a superwoman pin-up girl and Iago the parrot from the Disney film “Aladdin”.

The former U.S. Air Force test pilot said that in a few months he and his partner plan to start selling their figures for under $500 each.