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A couple of weeks ago, I finally bought my first RC airplane. I always wanted to fly one of these things when I was a kid, but never got to it. When a new hobby shop opened near work, I decided to take a peek to see if I should get an RC boat. I went with a friend from work who convinced me to get an airplane instead, so I got the HobbyZone Firebird Commander 2 model. This is a starter 2 channel plane, with this thing called “ACT” (Anti-Crash Technology) that makes it easier for you to fly.

Well, the ACT is not magical as you can see from the picture above. On my first day, I couldn’t find any good size fields to fly the thing in the first place. So I ended up messing up the wing on the first 2 tries, only flying the plane for a few seconds. Finally I ended up at a bigger location, and was successful flying the plane for a lot longer. Unfortunately I couldn’t land it, I didn’t really have enough space for a proper landing, and in one of the landing attempts the plane just nose dived and crashed. The wind didn’t help either, I should have followed the instructions and flown it with no wing.

The damages from this first day included:

• Dings and small damage (well in some cases small pieces missing) to the wing
• Broken tail wing
• Lost propeller
• Motor became detached from its casing in the fuselage.

The wing I fixed with packing tape, the propeller I couldn’t find and the tail wing wasn’t really fixable so I ordered those parts (total $20 with shipping and handling, less if I had bought them at the local store). The real problem was the motor. After tweaking it a bit, I was able to pop it in place and had to use some metal parts that were holding it inside the fuselage outside to it would hold with 2 screws. I almost glued it, but I’m glad I didn’t. The current setup it has seems pretty stable.

This past weekend I was able to do 3 successful flights with good landings, so it seems I’m finally getting the hang of it. This past Tuesday on the way to work, I flew it by 192 in Florida, and while flying it noticed the shuttle launch smoke trail on the background. That was very cool, too bad I didn’t have my camera with me.

I’m having lots of fun with this plane, and I’m already planning on the next steps. So many choices, there’s a “night flight” module that sounds interesting, and I’m looking at 3-channel RC planes that might be good after I want something more challenging. What really has my attention though are these aerial photography setups, either video or still pics or both, I might experiment with that soon.

I’m also looking at things like Sun SPOT technology, to start with simple things like recording the airspeed for the plane, and maybe even having programmatic control of it. The problem with that is that SunSPOTs costs over $500!!! Cool technology, but not affordable at all! Still, the idea of taking Java programming to the skies like this is very tempting, I’m hoping an affordable solution becomes available soon

For now, priority #1 is make sure we keep avoiding those crashes, specially when landing

Filed under: RC airplanes on October 23rd, 2007