Fun With the FT Viggen.

...fast and fun

The Viggen has proved to be a great addition to the fleet, being fast stable and distinctive in the air. And, all this despite it being my first Flitetest build.

Most amazingly is how easily, and stably, it launches; being flat underneath you have to launch it underhand and yet it climbs stably without threat of stall or spin.

It's benign characteristics are a combination of it being a delta, but also certainly due to the calming effect of the canards, keeping the nose up and reducing the load on the wings.

You can turn the Viggen as sharply as you like and it won't do anything nasty. In fact, so effectively will it turn that it's almost like it has vectored thrust, being able to keep on looping almost about its own length.

And it's quite quick too; my version runs a common-or-garden ebay fan with a 50A ESC and is good for about 100kph. You could load it up with a 12 blade fan although I'm not sure how much aero load you'd want to put on a foam board plane...

Flying the Firstar EDF

...on a sunny Saturday afternoon

Beautiful weekend weather begged for some flying, so I headed down to the paddock with the Firstar EDF conversion. The first flight of this has been on a cold & overcast morning, so this afternoon would be an opportunity to try out the big FPv plane in some sunny weather.

With the straight-shooting EDF unit, the flight characteristics are much more aligned with its close cousin, the phoenix 2000 glider, making it a real pleasure to fly. And today enjoying having a bit of fun cruising it around the open space of the paddocks.

Whilst EDF's are known energy hogs, the Forstar flies so much better and truer that I still think the overall performance and duration can't be worse than with that huge prop tower and negative thrust line. This still has to be tested when I get some proper FPV flying done, but even just punting the Firstar around is so much more fun now...