My main interest in flying models is rocketry. I had lots of fun with that when I was young. Unfortunately, I lived in Kansas at the time so my friends and I would wait months for a calm day. Sometimes we would get impatient and launch on a 'normal' day when the wind was blowing 15-20 MPH. So long, rockets! I always figured a boost glider would be even more likely to wind up in Colorado. In the mid 1990's, when my nephew was the right age, I became a 'Born Again' Rocketeer and we had fun building and flying. The in-laws gave the boy all the stuff to build a trainer type RC plane. I refused to build it, held his hand while he worked on it, but unfortunately he got discouraged before it was complete. The inlaws lived several states away and I don't know who they thought was going to teach him to fly it when it was done. Oh well. The airframe was totalled during a move and my sister off-loaded the electrics and gas motor on me, I still have them somewhere. Anyway, I discovered boost gliders and we built several and a parasitic glider as well. Now I have great nephews and nieces. It'll be a while before they're ready, but most of the activities I've done for fun in the past are too much for a guy in his mid-sixties. So my main interest is to convert some existing RC designs for boost gliding. Maybe I'll make a RC boost glider using my nephew's electrics.
Does Anyone Else Like Boost Gliders?
- Thread starter Agathon
- Start date
PsyBorg
Wake up! Time to fly!
Everyone has been converting those Walmart foam gliders into flyable RC models with minimal effort for a while now. Lok at @CarolineTyler posts of her builds and you should have nearly all you need to know. I Don't see why you could not do the same thing with rockets to power them.
JATO/RATO on a wally world glider would be pretty cool!
Marzipan
Well-known member
JATO / RATO? what is that an acronym for?
PsyBorg
Wake up! Time to fly!
Heh.. ANYTHING JATO or RATO is cool. I remember seeing a C130 do a short runway JATO take off at an air show back home at the old NAFAC airbase in Jersey. that bad boy had 5 per side rockets to get that big girl in the air. What a noise. That compression I felt is probably what got me into race cars as I could semi reproduce that rumble with race motors.
