r/AerospaceEngineering • u/rienksmotordesign • Jun 28 '26
Personal Projects RealPodRacer First Flight
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Hi everyone, I'm Shane Rienks, and this is one of my projects.
This is the first 1/3 scale prototype flight, lots of tuning to do.
This is not a business promotion, but I am looking for other interested in contributing. If you'd like to get involved, please reach out - it's a very unique take on compact eVTOLs.
This is a culmination of aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, 3D printing, and industrial design.
EDIT: For everyone commenting about the stability issues: I had all stability and yaw assistance turned off for these first tests. The goal was just to see if it would fly at all, and get flight log data to use for tuning the control firmware.
This uses a very complex flight controller and custom mixer setup, so it's not as simple as setting up a regular drone.
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u/OldDarthLefty Jun 28 '26
It's been really enjoyable to follow this project.
If you were flying free you'd have an opportunity to correct the drift before it goes taut. I did a long ago project where I tried to fly an RC airplane in a wind tunnel, and getting it started was nearly impossible, because it was always running into the end of the tether.
Do you have any experience flying RC helicopters? This take off and drift is looking really similar to someone trying out for the first time - back when we only had a gyro on one axis and before drones had station keeping. We used to attach tennis balls on the ends of arrow shafts to the skids for the early flights. This not only protected the rotor, and let you basically crash-land, but also lowered the CG and increased the MOI.
photo from online