Todd Ferrante's Aerial Photography Canard Plane

by Todd Ferrante  <back to homepage>
last edited 8/20/2006

Background: After crashing my estarter canard plane into a tree in Sept, 2005, with my good digital camera aboard, I was leery of flying with that camera on an RC plane ever again.  Still, I really wanted to participate in the "one day around the world" event on the RC groups Aerial Photography (AP) message board on Oct 1, 2005.  I decided to do one last flight with the good digital camera.  Now I needed a plane to carry it.  After the estarter canard crash, the wing was trashed, but the nose was still good.  I decided to transplant the long nose onto the Canmosa wing. 

Design goals:
I had very much liked the performance the long nose of the estarter gave vs the short nose of the canmosa.  I hoped that the long nose would give good pitch control, and the symmetrical Formosa wing would give good roll performance.  I envisioned sort of an aerobatic canard plane also capable of carrying DX6440 on one last aerial photo flight.

AP Canard Plane, mark 1 (10/1/05):
The new canard plane went together smoothly, and it's performance was all I hoped it would be.  It has great pitch control and aerobatic style roll  performance.  It so happened that we were visiting my bro-in-law's family in Harrisonburg, VA for the weekend of the 1st.  I took the plane along to get some photos for posting to the board.  Wouldn't you know that my niece was just fascinated with the plane?  She asked tons of questions, and while the flying was a bit boring for her, she loved watching the landings.

AP canard plane, mark 1.

Upon hand launching with the camera, I almost had another horrific crash.  After that I just took it up high and got a bunch of pictures with no messing around.  After a rough landing I took the camera off and ran a second battery just doing aerobatics.  Without the camera, the plane feels like a sports car, all light and airy with nice tight handling...

AP Canard Plane, mark 2 (thanksgiving, 05):
For the next couple months, the AP canard plane languished.  Without a camera, it was just another fun plane to fly (don't I just sound jaded?).  The guys at work and I all built matching flying wings, which we played with, trying for air-to-air contact.  I also spent a month or so experimenting with constructing a six foot wingspan twin boom plane from foam-core sign board.  This experiment was a dismal failure due to a crappy wing design.  The day after thanksgiving I was on a mission to pick up a small, cheap digital camera I could use for AP, without worrying about smashing it.  I ended up getting a Black Friday special deal on a Kodak C315.  This camera fit the bill perfectly, as it is small, light, and fixed focus.  It is also 5MP, so there is lots of room for cropping digital pictures.  It has two drawbacks.  The first is that there is no continuous picture taking setting, so I had to attach a servo to the top of the camera to press the button.  Second, it needs good, strong light to produce sharp pictures.  Overcast days, early morings and late evenings don't give good pictures.  The side looking mounting of the camera probably strongly contributes to this motion blur.  But, I am now back to taking aerial pictures, and am quite happy about it.

AP canard plane, mark 2.

The camera shutter is tripped by a servo zip-tied to the top of the camera.  I have a custom mix on my radio so the landing gear switch controls the camera servo.  The camera looks off to the side so the canard is just out of frame.  With a 1GB memory card, there is no danger of running out of memory.  A thumb screw goes through a piece of thin aircraft plywood into the tripod mount on the camera bottom.

Camera mount

Update 7/28/06.  I haven't flown this plane since a crash on 4/24/06. Of the next six weekends, for five of them we either had houseguests or were off visiting ourselves.  I never had time to repair the plane, and it's been sitting ever since.  I summed up my experience with AP canard on RC groups like this:
Canards have two plusses for AP: 1) They tend to be pushers, so the prop is not in the field of view of a forward looking camera. You want the camera to be forward looking to minimize motion blur. 2) The CG of a canard plane is back near the leading edge of the main wing. This normally means that the camera is pretty well protected in a nose-in crash.
There is one big minus. A canard plane needs to be landed with a bit of speed to prevent nose-ins. For stability, in a conventional plane the main wing stalls before the tail. This ensures that the nose drops, airspeed goes up, lift returns and recovery occurs. In a canard plane, the canard stalls before the main wing for the same reason. In a conventional plane, with the main wing in stall, you still maintain pitch control with the elevator in the tail. In a canard plane, if the canard stalls, you loose pitch control.
When flying AP missions, your landing sites are usually not optimal. There usually isn't room for long takeoffs and landings. For this reason, and also to protect the camera, you want to land as slowly as possible. In the canard planes I built, I would end up stalling the canard when slowing to land. If this happened a couple feet from the ground, there was usually no problem. But, I had enough nose-ins from head height to make me want to either redesign the canard, or to switch to a more conventional layout.
I've decided that my next AP plane will be a conventional winged, twin boomed pusher, much like the one in the right hand picture in Paul's post. The pusher gets the prop behind the camera, and the long nose provides a measure of protection for the camera.

Selected aerial photos:

These photos have been rotated, cropped and shrunk to fit this webpage.  The originals are of high enough quality and resolution to print 8x10 framable prints.

Ours is the garage on the left. Taken 12/24/05.

Since starting AP, I had been trying for a good picture of the condo we were renting.  I finally got the shot on Christmas Eve, 2006.  I was never quite able to get the right angle flying from the ball field behind Grafton HS.  Finally, I launched from the ball field, circled high overhead while walking 50 yards to a cul-de-sac at the end of our street, took a bunch of pictures, walked back to the ball field, and landed.  Just changing the angle slightly was enough to get the shot I was looking for.

Grafton High School.  Taken 12/24/05.

Since I've done much of my flying at Grafton High School, I thought it was only fitting to show one of the many pictures I have of the back of the school.

Brother-in-law's house in Harrisonburg, VA.  Taken 1/22/06.

This is a cool picture because it really shows what is possible with AP using a remote control airplane.  A piloted plane would never be able to get low enough for a shot like this.  I'm in the blue jacket at the right of the picture, and my wife is pushing my niece as she swings on the swingset.

My house.  On far side of fence. Taken 4/9/06

We bought and moved to a house right after Christmas.  I lost my wonderful flying fields within walking distance from my front door.  I still have a neighborhood elementary school very close by, but it's a car ride instead of walking, and a single ball field instead of a whole athletic complex to fly in.  Still, I am able to get pics of my house from the air when flying from the school.  I still haven't gotten a really good one yet, but I'm still trying...

Front view of my house.  Taken 4/15/06

I got brave and hand launched in the street in front of my house.  I got a pretty decent picture of the front of the house.  I just about had a horrific crash trying to fly down the street and land in the front yard.  This plane just isn't maneuverable enough for such things.