HBD Jay!

[Jay Vaughan]

> What is the airplane, Jay?  Got pics or a link?
> I keep meaning to get my son/daughter a plane kit..

So .. I’ve gone quite mad over the last couple of years on the subject of radio-controlled planes and stuff.  For my birthday I got two of these:

http://shop.flitetest.com/aircraft/ft-simple-soarer-speed-build-kit/

.. so that I could leave one at the Grandparents’ house for the boys to grow up with (they have *great* soaring hills in the neighbourhood) and have another one to use to teach the kids to fly locally (put a motor on these gliders and they go from 2-channel to 3-channel, easy fliers) .. they’re really easy to make and very easy to fly - and, also very easy to maintain (a bit of tape and they’re good again).  I’ve got quite a few of the other FliteTest kits - the 3-pack, the Spitfire, and a Versa Wing (not made yet) - and they are really great planes to fly as well as build.  You *don’t* need to have any complicated skills to build these planes - just watch the videos, get a nice glue gun and some good tape, and that’s all you need.

They’re not the prettiest planes, however - foam board gets ratty fast - but I can assure you that if you want to get into the hobby, nothing beats being able to swap the power plant out of a just-crashed plane into another fresh fuselage and get up in the air in a jiffy, and the FliteTest models really scale from easy-as-hell-and-fun-to-crash to oh-my-god-I’m-doing-displacement-rolls-with-this-thing.

Other than that, we attend the local RC-Model conference every year, and always depart with a factory plane .. the reason is that this is the cheapest way to get a set of electronics, the transmitter/receiver/servo’s/etc - as well as a flyable plane of course - so that when you crash the thing, you can take the electronics from the ruins and use them to build new things.  We’ve been building new planes for old factory-plane electronics for a year now, and it is *great* fun.  Check this recent reddit thread for links to interesting foamie designs:

http://www.reddit.com/r/radiocontrol/comments/1yoa10/sites_for_diy_foam_models/

What I like most about this hobby is that it teaches kids what equilibrium really means .. and equilibrium, as it can be attained through the assembly of raw materials, manifested into a flying device.  This really gets the juices flowing.  Flynn and I have a small fleet of planes we’ve built over the last year which incorporate the things he’s learned about - streamlining, lifting bodies, center-of-gravity balance, laminar flow, thrust vectoring .. its really a very rewarding hobby, if you approach it from the Builders’ perspective, and our idea is to get good enough at making new planes that it doesn’t .. really .. matter if we crash.  Every crash is a new opportunity to build something new.

We’ve even got our own experimental lab going on .. playing with the KF wing techniques that make sense now that we have near-infinite power in the form of brushless motors, with the view of making the simplest possible airplanes that still deliver great flight characteristics.  Not bad for a 44-year old, and two kids aged 6 and 3!  :)

Anyway, I could go on and on - so if you want advice/help on getting your kids into this wonderful hobby, I’m here for you.  :)