March of 2023 is when my journey into radio controlled planes began. The beginning was quite hectic, but looking back at it now I don’t regret the decision to dwelve into this hobby. The mistakes I made, the lessons I learned and the experience I gained is priceless. I learned about aerodynamics, plane designs, PID loops, power equipment, battery types, 3D printing, automated flight, telemetry radios, FPV equipment, got better at soldering, and SO MUCH MORE! This blog post is a short story of how I achieved my first flight 🙂
This old Instagram post of mine you see above shows the electronics I bought to get started. The basics are quite simple: you need a motor to pull (or push) the plane through the air, an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) to contr- ZZZzzzzzzz…. Did you just fall asleep..? You mean to tell me you just want to see the first plane? Alright, fine!
Well… not so fast. My first plane was a total disaster, and the reasoning was my own mistake. I didn’t do my research! The fuselage was, to put it nicely, a rectangular brick sporting a giant hole in the side for the electronics to be haphazardly thrown in. The wing was way too small, which would have meant that if the plane even managed to fly at all, it would have had to fly insanely quickly to stay in the air. Turns out, there’s this neat thing called the center of gravity (CG) of the plane. If you forget (or in my case, completely ignore) it, physics will outright refuse to let you fly. Jokes aside, the CG is crucial in every flying vehicle and lack of care in ensuring it’s set in the correct position has lead to devestating commerical plane crashes as well. Due to my non-existent research on the topic, I didn’t even know about this fact and had hot glued the wing randomly onto the plane where it looked right to me. The result was.. well… I’ll let you see for yourself.
After realising and correcting my mistake, I fixed the plane and took it out for another test run. Remember how I told you about the wing being too small? Upon throwing my plane, it proceeded to fall out of the air and crash despite having the throttle set to max. It simply couldn’t gain the speed needed to stay in the air!
Now we arrive at the exciting part. I finally did my research. Muhahahaha! 😼
I literally just watched a video on Youtube. Why didn’t I do that sooner? Uhhh… 🏃💨
I decided to redesign my entire plane this time using methods I found online to properly make the fuselage. The wing was twice as long this time with slight dihedral in the wings to make it stable in flight. I made the plane as simple as possible, which is what I should have done in the beginning. I suppose we all learn from our mistakes though 🙂
The first test flight was quite short as I didn’t have enough space to fly it close to my home. However it flew! I can’t describe how excited I was at the time, finally seeing a plane I designed fly properly. I went out with my father the very next day to the local park to properly test fly it.
Success! Well, sorta. I ended up loosing orientation and crashing the plane into a tree, after which it fell into a dry pond.. however it flew perfectly prior to that! Even the crash didn’t do a whole lot of damage to the it as I had it up and running the next day. I still remember the excitement I got from throwing the plane and watching it fly magestically through the air. Good times! 🙂
And that concludes the first flight. The plane I made after this one was a motorglider, which will be featured in the next post. Until then, see you next time!