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Rendered at 23:27:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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/
This sounds exactly like the sort of business I would want to build :D
What makes a person say things like this?
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.
On the other end of the spectrum is probably this guy's slope soaring videos: https://www.youtube.com/@SlopeRCGliders
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.
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.
https://pilotweb.aero/aircraft/flight-test-colomban-jet-cri-...
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.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM
If you build an A380 like here you sure don't want to use them unless you want to film it burning down spectacularly.
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.
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