I’ve been fascinated by model aircraft since about 2004, and got my first remote-controlled helicopter around 2005. The collection has since grown past twenty aircraft.
The Mini-Titan
The Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan E-325 was my first serious helicopter, a 450-class electric model a little over a metre long.
It went through more than a dozen sets of blades in short order because it kept meeting the ground. The first flight was also a lesson in choosing an appropriate space: I tried to fly a four-foot helicopter inside a ten-by-ten-foot room. It hit the wall and threw part of a blade into my leg, leaving an injury that took months to heal. I have two scars from Mini-Titan debris.
Once I stopped treating the room as an airfield, the helicopter became a platform for experiments. I added custom lighting with a controller that reproduced FAA blink rates, and an in-flight telemetry recorder back when model telemetry was still rare and awkward.
The Mini-Titan is still assembled and mostly ready to fly, though it has only been in the air a few times in the past decade. I would like to fit it with a modern flight controller and see what current stabilization does for an old airframe and for a pilot who learned without any.
Learning to fly
I learned mostly by flying the aircraft themselves, with no instructor and only a few hours in a simulator.
The rebuild was part of the feedback loop. A mistake meant resetting linkages, replacing blades, repairing foam, and checking everything before trying again. That cost taught me to stay inside the current envelope and take on one control problem at a time, rather than turning a manoeuvre into wreckage because it looked possible.
The simulator was useful, but it also made it far too easy to attempt something well beyond my skill without learning the steps that should have come first.
Aircraft along the way
Generic 3-channel helicopter. A large model with limited yaw control, difficult to fly in anything but calm air. I never became particularly good at it.
Blade mCX2. A small coaxial helicopter, slow and durable enough to hand to almost anyone. It survived four-year-olds who thought the crash was the best part, which earned it a permanent place in the fleet.
Generic IR mini helicopter. An infrared-controlled coaxial machine that arrived through a Christmas gift exchange. It worked well around the house, as long as I did not ask the signal to go around too many corners.
Blade XCP2. A small collective-pitch helicopter bought after the gift-exchange model renewed my interest in indoor flying. Much more responsive, and responsible for several new holes in the drywall.
Parrot AR.Drone v1. An early self-stabilizing quadcopter with two cameras and mobile-device control, closer to the start of the modern camera-drone category than to a conventional helicopter.
Fixed wing and rebuilding
My fixed-wing record began badly. A Flat-Outs Red Bull 3D foam airplane flew once before meeting the neighbour’s fence and never returning to service.
The Pluma 3D aerobatic airplane lasted longer. I rebuilt it completely three or four times after catastrophic “landings.” At some point a model stops being the airframe that came in the box and becomes a collection of repairs that happen to agree on a shape.
The fleet today
I still have the original helicopters and keep adding aircraft. The current fleet includes:
- Conventional helicopters and fixed-wing models
- A powered glider that can climb, shut down, and soar with an FPV camera in the nose
- Home-built 3D-printed quadcopters
- DJI Mini 4, Avata 2, and Neo quadcopters
Most of my flying right now is fast FPV quadcopter work, plus simple aerobatics in the airplanes: loops, lazy eights, and the pleasure of letting a larger wing take up some sky and glide. The quads are immediate. The glider gives me time to look around, which is a large part of why I keep both.