We decided to give making an RC airplane a shot. We have lots of parts from our drone projects. It’s interesting that we haven’t tried before. Drones appear to be more popular than rc planes if one goes by the internet.

We are going for the simplest thing we can think of. We bought some foamboard and cut it into the wing tail and body. We half cut through it to make the control surfaces.

We ripped a crappy small brushless motor and esc from our eldest drone project. The esc back powers the radio receiver through the control line

We had a bag of mini servos and a Turnigy 9x. The servos are directly connectable to the receiver unit. I don’t see why you’d need more than 3 servos to get starts. One for the ailerons connected on opposite sides of the servo horn so that they flap oppositely. We used paper clips as push rods. One for the rudder and one for the elevator flap. Putting the controller into an airplane mode is a bit confusing, but Ben figured it out eventually.

We sized things to look roughly plane like. I’ve heard a longer wingspan is better for trainers and gliders. Also we dug up a calculator for wing loading. All our stuff comes in to about 10oz.

We didn’t follow this but maybe we should have

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV5hILJe20U