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World's biggest RC A380 [video]
88 points by NaOH
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42 comments
mark_l_watson
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Awesome. I fly very small remote controlled airplanes and a tiny drone. I am a bit nearsighted and I fly my airplanes and drone relatively close to where I stand (10 to 75 feet). A friend flys a few large RCs, but I don’t think that size matters for having fun. I live in the mountains in Central Arizona, and I like to hit the flying fields just as the sun is starting to rise in the morning - beautiful time to fly.
BTW, 60 years ago my father and I used to spend a lot of time building our RCs. To be honest, now I buy incredibly inexpensive planes from China.
jacquesm
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I built a glider and flew it exactly once because I was too scared of crashing it after all the time that went into built it. The whole RC industry has made massive leaps, the first time I saw a modern radio I thought I'd received an empty bag...
JKCalhoun
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Yeah, I think I lean toward simplicity as well. I would be way too anxious trying to fly that work of art the guy built. I am glad someone out there does it though—it's a joy to watch.
On the other end of the spectrum is probably this guy's slope soaring videos: https://www.youtube.com/@SlopeRCGliders
hybrid_study
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Aprox how much does something like this unit cost?
phyzix5761
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My first thought was, "You could probably fit a couple of toddlers in there with cute little pilot uniforms."
janlaureys
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Been following this channel since the very early days and it's honestly mindblowing the scale and attention to detail of these models.
Ecco
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It sounds like it's electric powered. As much as I love brushless motors, I think a model of that scale and quality would have deserved actual jet engines.
ncrc74
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Tyler Perry owns the airplane and the property. He has said that he does not fly turbines due to the fire risk in a crash. His property is surrounded by forest. If he were to cause a forest fire, the negative publicity could have a major impact on his career.
JKCalhoun
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If it had been gas-powered motors, I would have agreed with you. The electrics sound close enough to my ear like actual jet engines though.
ajross
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RC-scale tiny turbines are sort of a boondoggle. They are loud, dangerous, and quite frankly reliability disasters. Expected component lifetimes are in the hundreds of hours, most folks overhaul them every 20-50 hours of use, and they fail in the air with shocking regularity (just check youtube).
It's one of those "impressive that it works at all" kind of things. If that's what you want to see in the air, then do it. If you want to watch your one-off custom plane that represents hundreds or thousands of hours of labor fly, you push it with a fan.
jacquesm
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There is an actual airplane (multi engine) that uses these:
https://pilotweb.aero/aircraft/flight-test-colomban-jet-cri-...
rwmj
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Is that a physics thing, or just jet engines are hard and RC budgets aren't very big?
dijit
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I wonder if it's not a: "maintaining this kind of engine is a heck-of-a-lot of work and is why there are so many aviation regulations and the reason engine overhauls are forced and cost millions-of-dollars" kind of thing.
lstodd
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Mostly physics. It's hard to do small jets, mostly because small things get too heat-stressed
I sorta watched a guy trying to build a hoverboard out of 50-kgf jets, it was crazy, hilarious and didn't go anywhere because flying a backpack of kerosene on four totatally unreliable jets ain't much fun in the end. They also cost about $5K each at the time.
wazoox
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AFAIK the only existing small jet engines for RC planes are much too small for this one.
ambicapter
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I wonder at what point you put in a flight control computer. I could imagine with a plane that size it's easy to put some big forces on it with heavy inputs.
zero_k
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It essentially already has one. Probably only self-levelling, but has some extra programming like delayed flaps, wheel-up sequence (first up the wheels, then close the doors), blackbox feature, etc. Likely using a version of Ardupilot [1] that's already in use by everyone. Maybe INav [2], but I'd wager on the former. There's more than one computer in there, too. The receiver is likely double-redundant (2 receivers, each with 2 separate receiver circuits, one 900MHz, the other 2.4GHz). I have planes costing 400 EUR that have dual-bandwidth redundant receivers (costs 40 EUR, a joke).
ELRS (radio), Ardupilot (Flight Controller), EdgeTX (Radio OS), and Mission Control (Ground Station SW) are serious tools used by many in the hobby. Them being open means there's a lot of competition and a lot of features. But also not amazing UX :)
[1] https://ardupilot.org/ [2] https://inavflight.github.io/
jacquesm
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INAV is a hot mess, I would recommend against it unless you like beta testing stuff in flight. They don't really have a good SW development process, which kind of surprised me. Betaflight is good for Quads (it nominally also supports some other vehicle types but it is pretty clear where the focus is) and for fixed wing or more complex or strange vehicles I'd use Arducopter or dRehmFlight.
pants2
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There's definitely some overlap in size between this and some real airplanes
richwater
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For anyone not familiar, most of this channel is funded IIRC by Tyler Perry who absolutely loves the RC hobby. You can see his estate in some of the wide shots (especially in the air). He had a custom made RC plane runway and workshop built on the property.
mrweasel
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Would there technically be any issues with remote controlling a real A380?