Ever since Flitefest 2016, after seeing Peter's giant cargo plane, NatonDesigns and I were super inspired and wanted to do something similar. Seeing the Rotor Riot guys drop out of it and attempt to land back in it was one of the cooleest things I've ever seen, and we wanted a similar experience.
We looked at a few designs online, and decided that Peter's design was roughly what we wanted to go for. We started with the fuselage, basically designing it so a miniquad would fit in it. We put a bomb door in it for the quad to fall out of.
After that we basically just winged it. We eyeballed the dimensions and worked around the amount of foamboard we had. The wing ended up being two pieces of foam board on either side of the fuse, with undercambered winglets on the end of the main wing. It is roughly a 7.5' wingspan.
Gluing the spar:
For electronics, we used four quadcopter motors from the old Electrohub kits. We are running 10" props on 3s, and it actually flies and looks relatively scale. We decided to include flaps, which is a good thing because our runway was barely long enough to take off. We thought it turned out pretty good looking!
(foot for scale)
For the maiden, we left the quad out of it until we knew it flew. It did! It was pretty tail heavy, but NatonDesigns was able to bring it down in one piece.
The maiden:
We added some nose weight and decided it was time to throw the quad in it. It went flawlessly. The bomb doors opened and my quad fell out just like we had planned. I wasn't sure about the quad arming and how hard it would be to recover, but it was much easier than expected.
Quad in the plane:
Releasing the quad:
This was one of the most fun builds I have ever done, and very fun flying as well. Check out the full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJ3GYNeh-0&feature=youtu.be
Thanks for reading/watching!
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