Slow Flight        by Bill Kuhl

                    Under Construction

Outdoor Flying

  Some pictures from a summer evening flying session in the backyard.  The plane is an original design, balsa construction, with a blue foam nose pod, covering Litespan. Radio equipment; Tetra receiver, and two FMA S-80 servos. Power is a VL HY50B powered by seven 150 mah cells turning a balsa prop.

Buy it or Scavenge the Components

There are very good ARF planes and power components available, but slow flight is for the person that likes to tinker also. Electric motors can be found in cameras, electric shavers, and surplus electronic outlets. Gear drives can be built from old servo gears and such.

Indoor Flying

Wespe jumps into the air.	Original design using Twin Turbo radio.
Bleroit II Cruises by.	Kolbri

Slow Flight

• Planes that you fly slow and close by. You can see every reaction to your control inputs easily. Small changes in speed.

• Planes you can take outside during the calm times of early morning or evening. Ride the lightest thermals.

• Planes that might be marginal in terms of power, etc.  Yet attention to small details means the difference between a plane that barely flies and one that flies very well. Can't use the brute force method of aeronautical design. Everything has to be a match, the prop, the batteries, the electric motor, the design of the plane. A setup completely different than you are used to; huge amount of positive incidence on the wing, several degrees of downthrust on the motor, wide wings with deep under-cambered airfoils.

• Planes that might appear to be much like the indoor rubber models that have been flown for years, yet on close inspection reveal hi-tech materials such as carbon fiber and kevlar.

• Planes that can be flown almost anywhere, safely. A large backyard, the empty lot down the street. By street light in the dark.

Slow Flight planes can look like a full-size airplane, this is an original J3 Cub in no-cal configuration.

Any Easy Way to Learn to Fly RC?

Outdoors under near calm conditions, a stable slow flight plane appears to be a near ideal way to learn to fly. Having handed the transmitter over to people that have never flown an RC airplane before, they were able to control the plane on the first flight with no need for me to take back the transmitter, even once.

Gentle Thermals

Slow flyers can ride thermals that are much too weak for even a RC sailplane. Not sure they are really thermals, it might be just air that is warmer than surrounding air and rises straight up.  The rising air continues into the evening.

You must keep the power on, the high drag of these planes make for a poor glide, but you know there is lift because the plane continues to go up as the motor speed is reduced.

To be continued...