Fixed-Wing Trainer

I think I can build an airplane. Not a kit. Not a toy. A real, flyable, radio-controlled fixed-wing aircraft — designed and built by hand, from foamboard, brushless motors, and a pile of components I ordered off the internet. I have no idea if it’ll fly straight on the first try. That’s the point.

Part two is live: Building a 4-channel RC airplane using AI as my only guide.

Part three is live: Fixed-Wing Build, Part Three: Airframe and Engine Mount.

Where It Started

My father built RC aircraft when I was in elementary school. Planes and rockets. Some of my fondest memories of him are sitting nearby while he put them together — the careful assembly of the airframe, the smell of balsa wood and glue, the way he’d shrink-wrap the covering over the wings with a heat gun until it was taut and perfect. I remember the agony when they crashed. I remember the quiet sense of purpose when they were repaired and rebuilt. He didn’t throw them away. He fixed them.

I remember going to Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley to watch my father and the other hobbyists fly. Standing in the grass, shielding my eyes from the sun, watching these hand-built machines climb and bank and circle overhead. The sound of the engines, the chatter on the flight line, the way a plane would catch the light in a turn. It opened me up to aviation, to engineering, to the idea that you could make something and then watch it fly.

I didn’t know it as a kid, but that park was built on a place where real planes once flew. The site was originally Mile Square Naval Outer Landing Field, built by the Navy in 1942 with three 2,200-foot runways in a triangular configuration for carrier deck qualification practice. After military operations ceased in 1974, the 137-acre center triangle — with its old asphalt runways still intact — became Orange County’s only public flying field for RC model airplane hobbyists. For decades, builders and flyers gathered there to do exactly what my father did: launch hand-built planes into the sky.

That’s gone now. The county had been pushing to develop the hobby area since at least 1994, and in 1999, a judge denied the hobbyists’ injunction to block an $8 million golf course expansion into the center triangle. They lost. The runways were paved over for a third 18-hole course, and the RC community was displaced. The Orange County RC Club has been searching for a permanent flying field ever since. As of today, they still don’t have one.

It makes me sad in a way that’s hard to articulate. A place where people built things with their hands and flew them together — replaced by a golf course. The runways where my dad flew are under fairways now. Something was lost there that hasn’t been replaced.

My father passed away. But that curiosity didn’t. It just sat there, quietly, for decades — waiting for the right moment to come back.

And now here I am, decades later, ordering brushless motors and ExpressLRS receivers off the internet instead of carving balsa. The materials are different. The radio technology is wildly better. But the feeling is the same: the excitement of laying out parts on a table and believing you can make something that flies. I get to do this again — with modern gear, with my own hands, and with everything he taught me by example.

The Modern Build

This project grew out of a conversation with ChatGPT and years of that latent curiosity. I’ve always been drawn to things that fly — the physics, the engineering, the sheer audacity of making something heavier than air leave the ground on purpose. When I started putting together The Maker Box, I realized I had the 3D printer, the soldering iron, the calipers, and — more importantly — the mechanical design skills to actually try this.

So I’m trying. The plan is a 4-channel foamboard trainer: ailerons, elevator, rudder, and throttle. High-wing, tractor configuration, hand-launched, belly-landed. Nothing exotic. Just the fundamentals done well enough to get airborne — and then iterated on from there.

Fixed-wing teaches everything I’ll need for drones later: power systems, radio links, control authority, stability, CG, trim, failsafes. It’s the stepping stone. Once I can reliably launch, fly a circuit, and land, the door opens to FPV, stabilization, GPS, autonomy — all the things that make “drone” mean something.

I worked through the design with ChatGPT — not to have it build the plane for me, but to pressure-test my thinking. What motor KV for this prop size? Where should CG sit on a high-wing trainer? How do I wire five channels through a PWM receiver without a flight controller? The guide that came out of that conversation is the reference document for this build.

It covers the full arc: inventory check, bench bring-up procedures (binding, ESC calibration, motor direction), airframe construction with specific dimensions, wiring diagrams, EdgeTX radio setup, servo geometry, preflight checklists, hand launch technique, trimming sequence, troubleshooting, and the upgrade path toward stabilization, FPV, and autonomy.

Download the full build guide (PDF) — 14 pages covering everything from parts to maiden flight.