If you've never flown before I would get the FT simple cub to start with. It's cheap and easily rebuildable. No matter how good you get, eventually you will have to rebuild. Get a hobby king 4 channel radio w receiver for less than $40. Then you can get the higher priced stuff later when your comfortable flying. In the long run you'll save money. I had to teach myself how to fly and they didn't have foam planes. It was painful seeing 3-6 months of balsa work repeatedly filling trash bags.Hello I want to get into flying. I am thinking about a sport cub s. But i don’t know if I shoud get the rtf version or the bnf with a spektrum dxe transmiter. I am on a small buget and I might want to upgrade to fpv some day...
Do you may have some advice for me.
Thanks.
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Fast Crash 45 thanks for your advice.If you've never flown before I would get the FT simple cub to start with. It's cheap and easily rebuildable. No matter how good you get, eventually you will have to rebuild. Get a hobby king 4 channel radio w receiver for less than $40. Then you can get the higher priced stuff later when your comfortable flying. In the long run you'll save money. I had to teach myself how to fly and they didn't have foam planes. It was painful seeing 3-6 months of balsa work repeatedly filling trash bags.
Quite welcome. It can be very disheartening at first so this route would have saved me bunches if money and time. I was just too stubborn to give up. Some people, I knew a couple air force jet pilots, thought because they knew how to fly real planes they could get a $5000 dollar copy of what they flew. In 30 seconds all that money was smoldeting at the end of the runway. They gave up immediately.Fast Crash 45 thanks for your advice.![]()
The Sport Cub S is an excellent trainer, HOWEVER Safe mode does teach you bad habits compared to learning the traditional way. If you have more money the larger Apprentice is excellent, those end up as second hand bargains quite often as well.
I own the Sport Cub S, I did teach myself the basics with it, it’s huge fun to use and not bad value for money, the toy TX that comes in the RTF bundle is fine for learning, you DO NOT need a full Spektrum TX, the DXE is not a good one either. One of the best things about that plane is anyone can fly it in safe, you can just scoot around on one stick once you get throttle control sorted and the CG right. It’s also awesome for touch and goes on calm days. It can have a $20 camera plugged in for FPV but isn’t very exciting on a camera, plus it takes a bit off the flight time. There’s lots of fun and cheap ways of getting into FPV later, like the FT mini Arrow, Scout or almost any plane can be fitted with a cheap VTX/Camera combo and flown FPV.
You can fly the Sport Cub S in very small spaces, it needs tuning to be really smooth, you have to CG it and I added a little nose weight to mine. There’s lots of videos on setting it up. Batteries are really cheap from Hobbyking, you can run the 200mah 1s Whoop type ones, they are $12 ish for 6 packs. The Sport Cub weighs well under 250g so new RC registration legislation won’t apply in most countries, check local laws.
You can’t fly the Sport Cub in higher than 10mph wind, it’s super light nature and low speed means it can blow away easily.
If you want to just fly Horizon Hobby BNF planes then you can use several other, better TX’s to do that. Many are under $100 and just as good (some say better) than Spektrum. If you have a more experienced FRIEND who will BUDDY BOX you and they have Spektrum then it’s easier to buy Spektrum, just get a second hand TX for that.
If you want to build something AND fly it, then FT designs are excellent and can be flown off a $35 Flysky 6ch transmitter very nicely, the Tiny Trainer is much better than the Cub IMO, easier to repair, can be built as a 3 or 4 channel, is easier to mod, can run on 2 or 3s and is cheaper as a speedbuild kit.
I would recommend buying the speedbuild kit if you want to build your first FT plane. Keep the frames from the foam board sheets then you can cut out new parts if you break anything. Get spare power pods and firewalls, you will break a lot of both as you learn.
I would get second hand if I was buying a DX6 or DX8. In fact out of the three TX’s I have two were second hand, both were perfect condition. Likewise my FPV goggles were used.
The Sport Cub S is tiny, that’s sometimes a problem. The advantage about small and slow is that bad things happen slowly and the consequences are less smashy.
Agreed. Or one of their other trainers. Either way, when you crash, (and you will) it's quick to build up the parts you destroyed and have it flying in short order. Lost count of the number of noses I've made for my Explorer. When people start comparing initial costs of FT planes vs RTF or BNF planes, they miss the fact repairing the RTF/BNF is much more expensive and takes time for parts to arrive. Pretty sweet to pull out a sheet of foam and be back in the air in no time.I would get the FT simple cub to start with