Vimana89
Legendary member
It's been a long and hard road for me getting into the hobby of flight the way I chose to do so, basically learning to build, design, and fly my own planes all at one. A lot of it is my stubbornness
, but it has yielded some success, and I have learned a great deal very fast, but with quite a bit of difficulty and quite a bit of frustration too. I'm very close to having a truly flyable build of my tandem wing design, but I'm going to set that aside for a time when I can build it slowly to perfection. For the holidays, I'm taking a slight detour from the mad scratch builder's corner and jumping into the hobby full on.I've decided to cover all my bases; Fixed wing, multi rotor, and something random and fun. I went with products that are reasonably priced and beginner friendly, with generally positive reviews, and that I liked.
Here's what I went with for fixed wing:
It's a good size, not tiny and not huge,3ch, 7.4v battery, clean simple design with a very nice high mounted pusher. This is roughly in the size range I want to build and design in, and it looks like a fun plane to train on.
For multi-rotor, I went with another reasonably priced, beginner friendly product, which will allow me to also mess around with FPV. I went with this little guy, reputable brand, newer iteration of a well liked design. I bought a kit with a little prop guard that fits all the way around, and spare props. Got some spare batteries as well.
For my third purchase, I went with a product that I had considered and asked a couple questions about before: the power up kit to turn paper airplanes and small gliders into rc planes. Why I opted to stay away is because somebody specified to me that it didn't give you much control, and was more of a powered glider than flight-and that whatever I built would not really have the flight characteristics of whatever I was going for. This was a good piece of advice, but I believe they must have been referring to an older model, because this is the power up aerobatic, and THIS looks to be like actual flight. It can perform tricks, and take off from the ground with landing gear. I'm under no delusion that this will give me as much control and variability as I could achieve building with larger power packs and multiple control surfaces, but it seems to be more than powered glide, and a great place to start to test lift and flight capabilities of certain wing shapes and designs. Here is the video of the aerobatic version:
Let me know what you guys think, I think it looks like an awesome bit of fun that will let me build small scale versions of whatever design I can imagine, with no real time or money lost if a build doesn't work. It can loop, barrel roll, take off from the ground...looks good to me. I can test the lift and capabilities of some of my designs with this to see if they will even fly before investing in a full scale build.
Here's what I went with for fixed wing:

For multi-rotor, I went with another reasonably priced, beginner friendly product, which will allow me to also mess around with FPV. I went with this little guy, reputable brand, newer iteration of a well liked design. I bought a kit with a little prop guard that fits all the way around, and spare props. Got some spare batteries as well.

For my third purchase, I went with a product that I had considered and asked a couple questions about before: the power up kit to turn paper airplanes and small gliders into rc planes. Why I opted to stay away is because somebody specified to me that it didn't give you much control, and was more of a powered glider than flight-and that whatever I built would not really have the flight characteristics of whatever I was going for. This was a good piece of advice, but I believe they must have been referring to an older model, because this is the power up aerobatic, and THIS looks to be like actual flight. It can perform tricks, and take off from the ground with landing gear. I'm under no delusion that this will give me as much control and variability as I could achieve building with larger power packs and multiple control surfaces, but it seems to be more than powered glide, and a great place to start to test lift and flight capabilities of certain wing shapes and designs. Here is the video of the aerobatic version:
Let me know what you guys think, I think it looks like an awesome bit of fun that will let me build small scale versions of whatever design I can imagine, with no real time or money lost if a build doesn't work. It can loop, barrel roll, take off from the ground...looks good to me. I can test the lift and capabilities of some of my designs with this to see if they will even fly before investing in a full scale build.