Friday Fanboy returns: RC electric planes

[Note: Friday Fanboy was a series I started a couple years ago to gush about something I use and like once a week. I can't remember why I stopped, but it was fun so I'll sporadically resume. File it all under "off topic"]

When I was an early teenager and all the other guys were playing sports, dating girls and otherwise being cool, I was into flying radio controlled model airplanes. Actually, I wasn't even cool enough for that. I was into building model airplanes. I was way too much of a wuss to actually attempt to fly them (the inevitable crash and destruction of months of work seemed like a poor bargain, which was a rare moment of sanity for the teenage me).

This was the late 1970s, and the big innovation in RC modeling at the time was small microchip-driven radio and servo components and heat-shrink plastic film for wing covering. I still remember building my first radio control transmitter and receiver, which was perhaps the closest I'll ever get to Make-level competence with a soldering iron and circuit tester.

Fast forward thirty years, and now I have kids of my own, which is all the excuse I need to pick up RC planes again (it's for the kids, allright?). In the intervening years there's been a revolution in the sport, thanks to spin-off technologies from the computer industry. The high-end radios are digital and use the same spread-spectrum techniques as wi-fi and cellphones, which gives them long range and freedom from interference. But the real revolution is that over the past five years, electric planes have become as powerful and ubiquitous as the noisy and fiddly glow-plug gas engines were in my youth, thanks to two major innovations:

• The brushless motor. In traditional electric motors, a brush transfers electricity to a rotating electromagnet, which spins within a ring of permanent magnets. In a brushless motor, the electromagnets are in the outer ring and don't move, and instead the core spinning shaft contains the permanent magnets. An intelligent electronic controller does the necessary current switching in the electromagnetic coils, with no contact required, which makes them far more efficient and quiet than traditional electric motors. Brushless motors motors first showed up in CD/DVD drives, and have now migrated in more powerful form to everything from hybrid cars to model planes.
• Better batteries. Thanks to the insatiable demand for higher power density for consumer electronics, we've moved from Nickel-cadmium (NiCad) batteries to Nickel metal hydride (NiMh) to Lithium Ion Polymer (LiPo) in our cell phones, MP3 players and laptops. This has carried over to model airplanes, and in combination with brushless motors electrics can now equal the performance of a gas-powered model with far less noise and hassle.

To get a sense of what the combination of those two enable, check out this awesome demonstration (thanks for the link, Francisco). The power-to-weight ratio of this kind of flat-body foam aircraft is about 2-1, which is a real tribute to the potential of electrics these days.  

That guy has serious skills. For the rest of us, they way to start is with something a lot less demanding: ready-to-fly planes with brushed motors and NiMh batteries. I tested a few such planes for Wired's gadget section last year, and I've since tried a few others in my quest to find a way back into the sport that works for kids and adults alike.

The first thing to keep in mind as you enter this sport is that it's hard. The combination of wind, the disorienting effect of flying from the ground rather than the cockpit, and the sharp turning required to keep a little plane in eyesight makes crashing frequent, expensive and, with the wrong planes, demoralizing. You can literally invest hundreds of dollars into planes that you can't keep in the air for 30 seconds, and the crashes can be catastrophic. 

That said, here's what I recommend (you can see that I've mostly gravitated to the ready-to-fly Hobbyzone line, which is based on a v-tail, carbon-fiber body spar and foam wing design that I think strikes the best balance of performance and crash-tolerance):

Best First Airplane: Hands down, the Hobbyzone Firebird Commander 2. Do not be enticed by the cool-looking and cheap RC planes, such as the Air Hogs line, that you can find in toy stores and Radio Shacks. They're underpowered and can't handle any wind at all.  Likewise, don't start with a three-channel (elevator, rudder and throttle) airplane, because that's too much to handle for beginners. The Firebird Commander is a lovely balance of stability and performance, with enough power to handle wind (which is very hard to avoid in the real world) and gain altitude quickly, while still being as simple as possible (just throttle and rudder). Tip: don't even try to fly any proper RC plane in anything less than a football field-sized space, and ideally something even larger. Trees are your enemy.

Best Second Airplane: Several candidates. After you're comfortable with the basics of launching, circling and landing, you should advance to three channels (typically rudder, elevator and throttle, but sometimes aileron, elevator and throttle). In that class, we're currently flying the Hobbyzone Firebird Freedom (its mid-wing design handles wind well, but can be a bit twitchy, especially on launch), the Hobbyzone Aerobird Swift (which has ailerons rather than a rudder, which give more control but requires a little coordinated elevator work to achieve the full effect. Nevertheless it's my favorite in this class). We're also flying a Multiplex Easy Star all-foam plane (shown), which is easy to repair (superglue fixes everything). Although its performance is just average it does seem to handle abuse well.

Best Third Airplane: I'm still looking for one. The ideal candidate would be stable and powerful enough to allow us to start learning proper stunts, from loops to rolls, while still being hand-launched and very crash-tolerant. The flying-wing style planes look very fun, and I've seen them often at the park, but are they just too hard to keep in the air? Advice, please.

 

UPDATE: Chester offers some real world experience with this kind of plane:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So instead, I think I'll go with this cool Spitfire instead:

Comments

[Jason Carroll]

Thanks! This summer I went through a RC Fever, but could never get a feel of where to start. After the snows and cold winds abate, I'll be ready to try the Firebird.

[Francisco Hernandez]

Check out F3P type flying sometime, heres a taste:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ux497FTW_5M

not for everyone, but sure looks amazing to watch!

[Fredex]

Geeky is designing your own RC planes. I had great fun coming up with versions of V tail RC planes.

The link is to the last V tail plane I built before switching to RC sailboats. Of course, I design my own sailboats, too.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/102/295576766_173ce602b4_b.jpg

[swl]

Check out goflykite.com I saw the "planes" demoed when I was passing through there a year ago and they ship internationally. Very cool as well and if you don't want to build it yourself. Also they have a software package you plug your remote into to train before you fly. Nice guys.

[Chester Bullock]

I had a plane similar to the Parkzone Striker - the results from the first flight are at http://www.bullockfamily.com/photos/photoview.phtml?photoid=1727. I put a lot of time into building this, and I probably should not have made it my first plane to fly. But the damage you see is from a direct flight into the ground from launch. I never really got to fly it.

However, we flew a Firebird plane for my son on several occasions after mine died, and it worked great. Been wanting to get another one. Maybe after baseball season when he and I have more time...

[Kevin Kelly]

Chris,

We also got a Hobbyzone Firebird as our first plane and after much fun we did manage to break the main stem. I thinking buying or making a cheap plane is no longer the gating factor. What I concluded is that the trick to these planes is learning how to fly them. It's very counterintuitive at first. Several pros have suggested using flight simulators with the RC control module as the driver is the way to learn. Have you tried that yet?

[Chris Anderson]

Kevin,

I've just ordered the RealFlight simulator so I'll soon see how well it works. Now that I've learned to fly with the cheap but simple planes, I want to avoid the same crash-driven learning curve for the more complex and expensive planes that will be coming next.

Chris

[Sean]

I'm just getting into RC planes and recently ordered the Carbon Butterfly from Plantraco. I've heard great reviews and it looks like a great option for flying around the living room or office. It also includes a freeware Flight Simulator. link: http://www.plantraco.com/hobbies/product_carbon_butterfly.html

[Jon]

I think you're wrong about the cheap Radioshack planes. The Air Hogs biplane, in particular, is a great toy and has become quite popular among the more hardcore RC crowd. It's extremely crash resistant, cheap, and easily modified (rip off the bottom set of wings etc). You can give the controls to a little kid without worrying about losing the plane.

MOST of the 30 dollar RC planes are junk, but a few are quite astounding for their price. Discussion on mods and other things here:

http://www.rcgroups.com/micro-rtf-420/

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[Tony]

Cool posting and video:

I thought I’d post some information here about our General Aviation film “One Six Right.” If you love planes or aviation of any kind, I think you’d enjoy our film. {Disregard if not interested.}

Here’s a link to our DVD extra that we’ve posted on YouTube.

“Flight”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_MahVsiQ98

Tony Briant
Marketing Coordinator
“One Six Right”
tony@onesixright.com
www.onesixright.com

For further insight into how One Six Right is positively affecting General Aviation, please visit these links:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Six_Right
5. http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/terwilliger/
6. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475994/usercomments?filter=chrono

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[Matt]

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[lee leslie]

I am an expert pilot, that is if the gauge of an expert is if he or she can fly a plane for experts only with proficiency, and I can. I recently took a vacation to Cabo San Lucas MX, we drove our motorhome down till we got a couple hundred miles S of TJ and decided that the roads were not good enough to continue as it was raining heavily, we then decided to go back to TJ and take a plane the rest of the way. Well, since we were now going to be flying I would only be able to take one small plane with me to fly on my trip. I took a parkzone cessna 210 which quickly broke on the first day in Cabo. I searched and searched for a honnyshop in Cabo to buy a plane I could fly while on vacation and ended up buying a Hobbyzone Ventura. Wow, what a piece of garbage, I mean this thing should removed from every shelf of every hobbyshop on the planet. Tried to hand launch5 or 6 times and was not able to keep the plane in the air longer than I would have if it were a rock I threw. After many attempts I wondered if I would have better luck if I were way high up and threw it off from there so i got to high ground where I launched a few more times. I did get it airborne if you call it that, on its way to the ground it made a continuous left hand turn nomatter what I did. I have over 100 planes and honestly strongly recommend that you do not purchase this plane under any circumstances, get something that flys well. the Supercub is the best 1st plane that comes to mind.

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