Designing a Tilt Rotor RC Jet

When it comes to aircraft projects, I think the wackier the better. Here's one involving thrust vectoring.

I've always found delta-winged aircraft fascinating; the way they cut through the air like bullets yet also stand on their tails at high alpha is pretty impressive. Recently the YouTube aerospace engineer Tom Stanton and I joined forces to see if we could build a delta with a twist. Here's how we went about coming up with the concept.

Brainstorming a Concept

Originally Tom and I wanted to design something that involved pivoting motors. We thought that having some level of vertical take-off would be interesting. Also, we wanted to see if we could get some insane levels of maneuverability. Before we could crack on with some sort of build, however, we'd have to decide on the aircraft layout. Before settling on the delta wing, we played around with some other ideas. This four-motored monster would have been a VTOL capable of some serious speed.

After some discussion, we decided to go for something a little less complicated. Sometimes, when embarking on a new project, it's a good idea to start simple. The next idea was to put two motors on the wingtips of a conventional canard jet.

After this, Tom came up with the bonkers idea of replacing the tail of an airplane with thrust vectoring motors. I'd love to have seen how this one turned out!

In the end, we settled for a thrust vectoring tractor setup on a delta wing. This would, most probably, provide the most stable platform to experiment with different flight modes and extreme aerobatics.

Defining the Concept

What were we going to test? Well, if the first flights were to go well, we wanted to test three main ideas. Firstly, we wanted to see how aerobatic we could make the delta.

Secondly, we wanted to experiment with slow flying. To do this, we could program the ailerons to act as flaps whilst increasing the angle of attack of the motors to keep the nose up. To make this work, however, the throttle would have to be carefully monitored to keep the nose up.

The final test would be to attempt some vertical take-offs from the tail of the aircraft. To do this, we would sit the Delta on its tail so it could hang from the props. It would be interesting to see how stable the model would be in this situation.

Starting the build

Tom began by designing the linchpin of the entire project - the tilt mechanism. This hardware was designed to have a 3D printed chassis and aluminum bar that mounted the two motors. This used one servo to move both motors together.

After having the device posted to me, I then set about designing an aircraft around it. It was extremely simple, being just a large delta wing with some rounded formers for the fuselage.