Todd Ferrante's RC Planes

by Todd Ferrante  <back to homepage>
last edited 11/19/2006

Way back in the fall of 1993 I built a balsa stickbuilt RC trainer style airplane right to the point where I would have had to drop a couple hundred dollars on servos and a radio.  Being extremely short on cash at the time, there was no way I could finish the plane, and I eventually sold it to a coworker a few years later.  I put my desire to fly RC planes out of my mind as not practically affordable.  Fast forward 12 years, and a current co-worker introduces me to extremely cost effective electric powered RC planes made of foam by a company called GWS.  Not only are they less than half the cost for a kit, the kit comes with a motor, and is easier to build, to boot!  A few weeks later I had a radio, battery charger, and a GWS eStarter kit.

The GWS eStarter:

The freshly built eStarter.

My first flight of the eStarter was 2/5/2005 at the high school track behind my house, and it didn't last long.  But, the second flight lasted a couple laps before the predictable crash landing.  For the next couple months, weather permitting, I flew any time I could.  On weekends I would roll out of bed at the crack of dawn, while it was still calm.  I would fly until I crashed, take the pieces home, and epoxy the mess back together.  When the winds died off just before sunset, I would fly until I crashed, do repairs all evening, and go to bed.  I flew Saturdays and Sundays, and evenings after work if I made it home before dark. 

The beginning of my first flight...  Closely followed by the end of the first flight.
Note to other eStarter pilots: plane will drop from sky if wings are perpendicular
to ground.  :)

The flights would get longer and longer until I started trying new things, then the crashes would happen again.  When I got to the point that I could go through two battery packs (one flying session) without a crash, I would try something new.  If I was taking home the plane in just one piece, I didn't feel like I was really pushing the envelope enough.  Meanwhile, the plane kept getting heavier and heavier as the percentage of epoxy in it increased.  Finally, it was just too much of a pig to really do much.  At that point, my work friends introduced me to the Formosa.  One interesting flight was on a day after the track team started spring practises.  They would leave hurdles sitting on the track, which I sometimes wouldn't move.  I ended up flying through a hurdle while landing.  Actually, the fuselage went through.  The wing stayed behind.  More epoxy, please...  Another memorable occasion was when I was attempting to fly between the field goal posts, and hit one dead smack in the center of the prop shaft.  It made a very loud PING and dropped to the ground.  The battery took out the windshield, and the motor was smashed back embedded in the firewall.  More epoxy, please...  My flights at the track have been much less eventful since I stopped interacting with the athletic equipment.  (I have yet to put a plane into a chain link fence.)

The GWS Formosa:
My flying friends and I got together in the spring to fly our planes.  Denny, who was just learning, took up a slow stick.  When his flight was over, I sent up the eStarter.  It was much faster, and could do loop after loop after loop.  Attempts at rolls, however, resulted in 20 foot drops in altitude and near misses with the ground.  (Attempting rolls in the eStarter resulted in my worst crashes.)  Mike then took up his new Formosa for the first time.  What a rocket!  Loops, rolls, whatever.  It did them all.  It was great!  As much better than the eStarter as the eStarter was over the Slow Stick.  When I got home, I immediately ordered one.

The Formosa

When I built my Formosa, I made some key modifications based on watching both Mike and Kevin fly theirs.  First, I set aside the single fiberglass wing spar and replaced it with two smaller carbon spars, one on top and one on the bottom of the wing.  This made the wing much stiffer.  I also changed the plane from a tail dragger to a tricycle style, with steerable nose wheel.  I had made this modification to the eStarter and liked the better steering properties as well as how the nose gear reduced the number of broken props.  I also added some carbon fiber reinforcements on the skin where I had heard of weak spots in the fuselage.  The number of these reinforcements has grown as I have found more weak spots.  :)

A takeoff with the Formosa.

I am still flying my Formosa and loving it.  The only drawback is that it tends to be tricky to land as the battery wears down.  All my crashes on this plane have been landings that went wrong.  Most were because of trying to land when the battery was so weak the plane was dropping out of the sky.  This plane is slated to get a brushless upgrade shortly.  I'm hoping this will help out with the underpowered landings.

The Canmosa:
I go into greater detail on my Canmosa Page, but in short: Mike crashed his Formosa and gave me the leftovers.  I used the dead Formosa to make a canard style plane.  My overweight eStarter will probably get the same treatment soon...

The canard plane I made from a GWS Formosa.  The Canmosa!

The Estarter Canard:
Eventually, with all the repairs to the estarter fuselage, it got too heavy to fly.  I think towards the end the fuse was more epoxy than foam.  I got the idea to discard the fuselage and convert the wing and elevator into a canard style plane.  Fate intervened when I was presented with the parts to make the Canmosa.  After one too many crashes, I decided to return to the original Estarter canard plane conversion, with the intent of making a stable platform for aerial photography and video.  More details on the Estarter Canard page.

The canard plane I made from the GWS Estarter.  Still needs a catchy name.

The AP canard plane:

After crashes took out the Canmosa nose and the estarter canard wing, I took the wing from the former and the nose from the latter and made a new canard plane.  This one now mostly hauls my small AP digital camera.  More details on the AP canard plane page.

This canard plane I use mostly for aerial photography.

Big Red Aerial Photography Plane:

Trying to do slow landings with the canard plane kept resulting in canard stalls followed by nose-in crashes.  I finally got tired of replacing gears in the canard servos and built a more conventional plane for AP.  It's made from two Slow Stick wings spliced together and bottom skinned with depron.  More details on the Big Red page.
Big Red AP plane.