Category Archives: Fixed Wings
Florida Jets
Florida Jets takes place at Paradise Field on the Lakeland Airport grounds March each year. With over 150 pilots, this event features a large collection of turbine jets. This year, the jets took off from the new 700 foot long by 50 foot wide blacktop runway which includes a Bahia Grass runway adjacent to the hard surface.
Florida Jets is a “Jet Together”, not a competition. It is a family event with a international group of pilots and vendors brought together to sunshine Florida. Here are a collection of the jets captured by our crew, highlighting some of the biggest and fastest RC Jets in the world. I start with my favorite video, all about landings…
Learning to fly differences in quadcopters and fixed wings
I tend to just yaw (rudder) for a quadcopter to turn, even though I find myself always using the aileron stick to reduce a skid and create the effect of a turning plane when filming for fun. If you are spending your money on a camera gimbal, than you will probably be keeping your quadcopter as level as possible on all turns.
As for planes, they tend to bank over during a turn, so this changes how you actually use your sticks. The easiest way to understand turns is to visual the elevator as becoming more vertical (so it acts more like a rudder) and the rudder becomes more horizontal (so it acts more like an elevator) during a turn. The results of turns for most RC planes, the rudder really isn’t useful as a rudder except when you’re entering the turn (i.e. plane hasn’t banked over yet) or exiting the turn (i.e. plane is almost back to level). Some trainers actually recommend applying opposite rudder during the turn to keep the nose up for a smoother turn, since the rudder is acting more like an elevator. However in most cases, during the turn the elevator makes a perfectly good rudder and you can therefore just fly with ailerons and elevator with minimum throttle. Hope you got all that, as that was a early lesson I had before taking my first fixed wing flight…
Walkera E-Eyes GPS Plane
Synopsis: Looking to quickly add to our fleet of search planes, we snooped around for some ready-to-fly GPS planes in the market for our volunteer trainers. We contacted Walkera to find out more about their new planes. We have decided to test this new model E-Eyes GPS. This selection is based on it’s FPV readiness, failsafe and the GPS flight controller that is compatible with our 10 channel radios or use your own receiver/radio.
During the test we will see how it handles in turbulence, flight time, payload, GPS accuracy and failsafe. Those nation flags are going to stay, as they match our volunteer list country of origins…
