Building anything that flies from scratch is an ambitious undertaking, even if it’s ‘just’ radio-controlled. 3D printing the aircraft isn’t that odd these days, but putting a hot jet engine into a plastic airframe is another ambitous reach. Getting said 3D printed airframe up to the transonic speed of Mach 0.8? Ambition, thy name is Kingchaser. Or at least, that’s the name [The Mach Initiative] give to their very ambitious aircraft, the video about which is embedded below.

The airframe is largely 3D printed from PETG– that’s all the orange bits– but there are carbon fiber rods and an aluminum frame to help take up the strain. The black section around the motor is printed from PPS-CF– that’s Polyphenylene sulfide with carbon fibre–wrapped in carbon fiber to take the heat. This all builds off a smaller PLA version that’s already flown called Kingfisher, which claimed the title of the first 3D printed jet. That flight is on their YouTube channel, if you’re interested.

Now with a bigger aircraft and a much bigger engine– 300 N or 68 lbf of thrust– they’re going for the speed record. If they get even close to the design goal of mach 0.8, they’re absolutely going to leave the world’s fastest drone– a 626 km/h quadcopter we’ve written about— in the dust.

The switch to PETG from PLA, for the record, was to deal with the expected aerodynamic heating at that speed, about 990 km/h or 615 mph. An interesting detail many don’t bother with when it comes to 3D printed airplanes is that the skin has all been polished smooth, since skin drag is dominant at that speed regime. The video is just chock full of those little details that it takes to defeat drag and get to the record speed, and there’s more to come from [The Mach Initiative].

Speaking of remote controlled speed records, we covered another batch of brits take home the land speed record a few years back. May [The Mach Initiative] see such success!