World's biggest RC A380 [video] | Hacker News Reader

World's biggest RC A380 [video]

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110 pointsNaOH54 comments

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.

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

That "almost clipped that tree" and hitting the wing on the tree on the ground gave me heart palpitations.

Those RC glider videos are so beautiful, thank you for the link

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...

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.

I assumed this was a case of name collision but no, this really does seem to be the same Tyler Perry who created the Madea movies.

My first thought was, "You could probably fit a couple of toddlers in there with cute little pilot uniforms."

When do they start passenger service?

A bunch of mice to simulate passengers.

Ok, who chewed through the rudder control line? No cheese for you!

Cutting back on the in-cabin cheese service is what caused this problem in the first place!

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.

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.

Thank you for inadvertently answering a question I had, which was who owned that estate.

I'll preempt future comments that lithium batteries can catch fire too. I agree with that statement but still think the risk is mitigated by not going with gasoline fuels.

That property is gorgeous and Tyler pulls out all the stops for his builds. That channel (Ramy RC) has quite a few of them.

The closeness of the trees to the runway kept giving me extreme pucker ...

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.

There is an actual airplane (multi engine) that uses these:

https://pilotweb.aero/aircraft/flight-test-colomban-jet-cri-...

Is that a physics thing, or just jet engines are hard and RC budgets aren't very big?

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.

Just yesterday, someone posted a link to a Veritasium video[0] explaining how a jet engine internal temps of 1500°C work when the components have a melting point of 1250°C. I couldn't imagine doing that at a small scale by hobbyists.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM

Yes, and those small engines might work for a bit, but then they just burn out, this is inevitable.

If you build an A380 like here you sure don't want to use them unless you want to film it burning down spectacularly.

Sounds perfect for Hollywood practical effects vs boring CG

One can wish.

Besides, thrust control is shit even on their big brothers, on those, it was like throttle down - flameout, throttle up on the other two - flameout, oh crap, thank god we're doing tethered tests.

Gas dynamics on these scales are tricky too. Electric is the way to go for this.

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.

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.

AFAIK the only existing small jet engines for RC planes are much too small for this one.

They've been scaling these things up over the past decade. The JetCat P1000 can exceed 200lbs of thrust.

What they really for this kind of build are RC turbofans, which are extremely uncommon. This thing puts out over 300lbs of thrust at full throttle:

https://www.frankturbine.com/en/FT1500.html

There are certainly turbines available that could power the model. He chooses not to.

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.

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/

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.

> But also not amazing UX :)

This sounds exactly like the sort of business I would want to build :D

Been following this channel since the very early days and it's honestly mindblowing the scale and attention to detail of these models.

Aprox how much does something like this unit cost?

First of all you need a house with a runway…

It looks like the airstrip is attached to the servants' mansion. In parts of the video you an see the aircraft overflying the main house. It's the Temu Versailles.

> servants' mansion

What makes a person say things like this?

A house with a runway is cheap in some places; I've seen driveways that are marked as private runways in the rural areas.

Definitely falls into the "if you have to ask" category

I wouldn't want to imagine, but it's funded by a billionaire, Tyler Perry, so I'm guessing the cost wasn't an issue.

Apparently the real big ones are like $100k.

Fun fact: He builds these with / for the actor Tyler Perry, whom has a hanger and RC airstrip at his home.

He also learned to fly as in obtaining an actual pilots license to over come the fear of flying.

There's definitely some overlap in size between this and some real airplanes

It is a real airplane. Remotely controlled, but still real.

Would there technically be any issues with remote controlling a real A380?

Since it's got autopilot, and AutoLand, I don't see a problem with that. In fact, there have been remote controlled full scale airplanes since WW2[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite

Range?

The size of that thing! And what a landing...

You rarely see advertisements for confiscatory income taxes quite as effective as this one.

...And here I am scouting for remote meadows to fly my 7 and 10 inch prop fpv drones...

The large ones dust crops out here where I live. Pick a field, ha ha.

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