RC airplane

30 Articles

Flying An RC Airplane With Twin Airblower EDFs

November 2, 2026 by 14 Comments

Shortly after [RCMakerLab] posted his question on potentially equipping an RC airplane with the electronic ducted fans (EDFs) from those airblower devices – are sold mostly as a replacement for canned air – the comment sections pretty much exploded with comments that he should just have strapped them onto an RC airplane and see for himself. In a new video this is exactly what is done, creating a somewhat A-10 Warthog-esque RC plane with its twin EDF turbines.

After we first covered this journey, the next question that got answered in the subsequent video was whether replacing the default electronic speed control (ESC) would make sense, mostly to lighten the load and optimize it for use with a typical RC avionics controller.  This turned out to be the case, and thus it’s time for a test flight.

The aircraft created from largely styrofoam board seems to be largely designed for stability, with its large wings and the very A-10-like placement of the turbines right above the tail with its twin vertical stabilizers. It wasn’t really a shocker to see that the resulting 368 gram light airplane actually flies pretty well, with it taking off almost immediately.

With the used 2S1P, 1300 mAh Li-Po battery total flight time is about 3-4 minutes, which seems about on par with typical numbers. With a larger airplane and battery these two EDFs probably could be pushed even further, which we fully expect to see in a future video.

Continue reading “Flying An RC Airplane With Twin Airblower EDFs” →

Turning An Old Phone’s Motherboard Into An RC Plane Controller

October 28, 2026 by 10 Comments

Upcycling smartphones makes a lot of sense, especially since they contain so many components that remain useful long after their desirability as a smartphone has faded. In the case of [Mountain DS Lab], they opted to use an 8-year old Xiaomi Mi 8 phone to add long-range FPV video link and remote control functionality to an RC plane, using the phone’s LTE cellular connectivity.

The smartphone was bought used for $23, with the default Xiaomi ROM overwritten by LineageOS to get a more lightweight and up to date Android installation on it. From the video it’s clear that this phone has seen better days, with the glass back cracked and a few ugly lines running across the display. Fortunately all that is needed is the motherboard itself.

One gotcha here is that the OS checks for the display on boot and will time-out if it’s not present, potentially halting the process entirely. The workaround requires disabling the display in the device tree, which is done by modifying the boot.img file as explained in the video. Next a custom bracket for the motherboard was printed so that it could be fitted inside the target airplane.

To communicate with the avionics, a USB-to-UART adapter PCB was created with a CH340 IC on it. This was then connected together for an initial test, with the extended front camera being used as the FPV camera for the custom Android application. Using the controller via the remote LTE link worked with the flight controller, so next the airplane was assembled for initial testing.

From this point it’s all pretty standard RC airplane assembly and testing, just with the typical RF-based control and FPV link replaced with the LTE link. Unfortunately flying drones isn’t permitted in the immediate area where the creator lives, so only some taxiing was tried prior to its maiden flight at a local airstrip that will be featured in an upcoming video.

Naturally, this isn’t the first time that someone has tried this type of remote control, with the ongoing Russo-Ukraine war being a prime example of LTE-based remote control of drones. Although we do not advocate wiping out a third of a nation’s strategic bomber fleet with upcycled smartphones, ultimately this is the same technology and a good way to create an RC drone that can last more than the few kilometers eked out from a 2.4 GHz link or so. Just be prepared for the LTE link to add a few milliseconds of latency.

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[Avery] standing inside the inflating envelope of his airship

Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship Is Supposed To Be On Fire

October 6, 2026 by 15 Comments

We’ve had a lot of flying hacks here over the years, and that includes just about any way to get airborne you can think of — but very few of those have been airships. Fewer still have been 27-foot thermal airships, like the one [Avery Flies] designed and put together recently.

A thermal airship, in case the name doesn’t give it away, is a dirigible hot air balloon. Like a hot air balloon, it gets its lift from the density difference between hot air and the regular atmosphere. Unlike a hot air balloon, it has control surfaces and an engine so it goes where you tell it to. The craft uses good-old-fashioned radio control, and except for the nylon envelope he spends the first 15 minutes of the video below designing and sewing up, the technology mostly comes from be from the world of R/C aircraft.

The big exception is of course the a propane burner used to generate heat, said propane being supplied by a pair of small green tanks such as you might use on a portable barbecue. Everything that moves is electric, though: there’s a 70 mm (about 2¾“) electric ducted fan acting to push the air up into the balloon so it keeps shape, and a great big brushless DC motor pushing an 18” (about 457 mm) prop for thrust. The steering servo is actually a repurposed winch servo from an R/C sailboat, rather than anything from the world of model aircraft. But it makes sense, as the meter-scale fabric rudder is more like a sail than the control surfaces of most R/C aircraft.

You might expect a blimp to be the biggest flying machine we’ve featured on Hackaday, but some truly giant-scale R/C aircraft have come our way in the past. We’ve also seen some pretty teeny blimps.

Continue reading “Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship Is Supposed To Be On Fire” →

Disassembling A Mini Air Blower To Make RC Airplanes

September 8, 2026 by 24 Comments

As a certified RC airplane fan, the [RCMakerLab] on YouTube found themselves looking at one of those nifty mini air blowers that provide an alternative to a compressor and canned air for dusting and other high-volume, high-pressure air-related tasks.

Inside these quite affordable units is a ducted fan (EDF) that can produce fairly high levels of airflow to get to every last dust bunny hiding on a PCB or inside a keyboard, raising the question of whether you could use these to fly a model airplane with.

As can be seen in the torn down unit, there isn’t a lot to these air blowers, with the ESC bolted onto the EDF and only the speed regulator and on/off switch being external controls. This would make it very easy to integrate into an airplane, but leaves the question of whether it can generate enough thrust to make it worth the effort.

Using a custom rig, it was shown to generate up to 110 grams of thrust with a current of 16.5 A, which would at least go a long way to carrying its own battery pack. In order to create an airplane with it, probably two of these motors are needed. There’s also the potential of reducing weight by changing the ESC and such, making reusing these little EDFs from any discarded or broken mini air blowers at least worth a shot.

At the very least, it seems like it has a better shot of working than a plane powered by an electric leaf blower.

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A man standing next to an RC model of an Airbus A380 aircraft. The fuselage is at elbow height and the tailfin appears to be over his head.

World’s Biggest RC A380 Is A Big Deal

June 27, 2026 by 15 Comments

RC planes are a lot of fun, and the bigger the better! [Ramy RC] has built the world’s biggest RC A380.

At 29 ft (8.83 m) long, with a 32 foot (9.75 m) wingspan, and weighing 800 lb (362 kg), this 1/8 scale jumbo jet is not your typical model. The fuselage is built from CNC cut EPS foam layed up with fiberglass on the outside and carbon fiber inside. The wings have a combination of carbon, aluminum, foam, and wood components to handle the aerodynamic loads.

The attention to detail is wild. Instead of painting the windows, each one is an actual hole in the plane with a 3D printed window frame and acrylic window. You can actually see one falling out of the plane in the video below. An Airbus mechanic in the comments even notes the landing gear door order of operations are identical to the real thing.

If [Ramy] looks familiar, perhaps you remember his previous A380 build? Much like the 747, the full size A380 is no longer in production, but they can run on cooking oil while they’re still flying.

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Building A Flying Blended Wing Body Aircraft Prototype

December 17, 2025 by 16 Comments

Anyone with an inkling of interest in super-sized remote control aircraft probably has at least seen some of the mind-blowing projects that [Ramy RC] has worked on over the years, with examples like the ongoing Airbus A380-800 build approaching the size of a full-sized business jet. That said, they recently got the offer to build a flying prototype of the Natilus Horizon, a blended wing body (BWB) aircraft that’s currently being developed into a full-sized production aircraft.

Suffice it to say that BWB RC aircraft isn’t something that they have built before, but as co-founder of Natilus, [Aleksey Matyushev], explains, they want to prove in this manner that building scale prototypes of future production aircraft is not nearly as complex as it’s often made out to be. Meaning that even two blokes in a shed as is the case here should be able to pull it off.

Natilus was founded in 2016 amidst strongly rising interest in these BWB aircraft designs that may one day threaten today’s tubes-with-wings. Their Kona design would be the cargo version and this Horizon prototype that [Ramy RC] is building the passenger version.

In this first video of two total, we can see the CAD project of the prototype and how the basic aircraft structure is being constructed out of carbon fiber composite, wood and foam. To this the engine nacelles, landing gear and wings are mounted, readying it for its maiden flight. The Natilus engineers have previously done all the simulations that should mean that it’ll fly like a glider, but we will have to wait until the next video to see whether that is the case.

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Hard Lessons Learned While Building A Solar RC Plane

September 9, 2024 by 17 Comments

Although not the first to try and build a DIY solar-powered remote control airplane, [ProjectAir]’s recent attempt is the most significant one in recent memory. It follows [rctestflight]’s multi-year saga with its v4 revision in 2019, as well as 2022’s rather big one by [Bearospace]. With so many examples to look at, building a solar-powered RC airplane in 2024 should be a snap, surely?

The first handicap was that [ProjectAir] is based in the UK, which means dealing with the famously sunny weather in those regions. The next issue was that the expensive, 20% efficient solar panels are exceedingly fragile, so the hope was that hot-gluing them to the foam of the airplane would keep them safe, even in the case of a crash. During the first test flights they quickly found that although the airplane few fairly well, the moment the sun vanished behind another cloud, the airplane would quite literally fall out of the sky, damaging some cells in the process.

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