Three planes, three time limits, all flown. The result surprised me: more build time doesn't automatically buy you a better airplane — but it does buy you a different kind of airplane. Here's the full story, plus the build details that didn't fit in the video.
| Time | The plane | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1 minute | Paper airplane + PowerUp 4.0 module | Airborne — barely. Bluetooth range killed it twice. |
| 1 hour | Foam board wing + box fuselage, rudder/elevator | The shock of the day. After two small tweaks it flew amazing. This is the one to copy. |
| 1 day | Bush plane with flaps, LEDs, 3D-printed gear | The keeper — the plane you're excited to pull out every session. |
Sixty seconds is enough time to fold a paper airplane — I got the wing line folded with about five seconds left — and clip on a PowerUp 4.0, a little phone-controlled module with a motor and rudder that turns any paper plane into an RC plane.
In the air it pitched straight up the moment I gave it throttle, then flew out of Bluetooth range and went silent. Twice. I only got it back because it was bright red. I flattened the folded elevators and tried again — same story.
What the video doesn't have time to explain: the PowerUp's limiting factor is its Bluetooth link, which is good for maybe 30 meters on a clear day. A paper airframe also has no dihedral and almost no directional stability, so any throttle change becomes a pitch change — there's no tail volume to resist it. It proves you can get something airborne in a minute. It doesn't prove you can fly it.
One hour, one goal: best-flying plane, not prettiest. I went with the shapes that foam board is best at — a simple straight wing with a spar and a little dihedral, a box fuselage (not flashy, but fast to build, light, and surprisingly strong), and a basic tail. Electronics in, and I even had six minutes left over for a quick spray-paint scheme through a cardboard mask.
First flight: it flew, but it was pitchy — twitchy in a way that makes you grip the sticks. Back at the bench I made exactly two changes, and this is the part every beginner should steal:
Those two things completely transformed it. Second flight it flew so well I was asking out loud how a one-hour plane flies this good. Loops? Yes. Rolls? No — and here's why: it's rudder-and-elevator only. A rudder yaws the plane and lets dihedral convert that into a gentle bank; you need ailerons for a proper axial roll. That's a feature for a trainer, not a bug — fewer channels, fewer servos, gentler responses.
Full confession: the one-day build started as an A-10 Warthog using a fuselage-forming technique I'd never tried. I scrapped it partway through. That's a real lesson in itself — a time limit is the wrong day to learn a new technique. I switched to something I understood: a bush plane in the spirit of the Flite Test FT Bush plane. (It was July 4th. What's more American than a bush plane?)
With a whole day I could add everything I normally skip:
The 1-day plane's landing gear came off my Bambu Lab P2S — in PLA it's strong enough for grass-field abuse, and on a one-day build the printer can't be the bottleneck.
The spec that matters: parts that print right the first time — a time-limited build has no slack for reprints.
Whatever you print with: a time limit is the wrong day to learn a new technique. I scrapped the A-10 fuselage mid-build for exactly that reason.
The maiden was at dusk: slow, stable, beautiful at half throttle, flaps down for crawling approaches. One battery ran low and forced an early landing — set a flight timer, people (the flight time calculator exists for exactly this). Then the sun went down, the LEDs came on, and the whole build made sense.
No — it buys a different plane. The 1-hour plane flew nearly as well as the 1-day plane in daylight. What the extra day bought was capability: flaps, ailerons, lights, looks, and a plane with personality. My honest recommendation: start with the 1-hour class, and graduate to the 1-day class when a build stops feeling like a gamble.
Everything below is what I use on this class of plane. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases — everything here is in stock and ready to ship.
Plus: hot glue, bamboo skewers for spars, rubber bands and velcro for the battery, and a $1.25 sheet of foam board. The Checklist Builder resizes this list for any wingspan.
Spot something off? Tell me and I'll fix it.
Auto-transcribed from the video, so expect the odd mis-heard word. Here so you can search or skim what was said without watching.
What if I only had one minute to build a Narsie airplane? Or an hour, or an entire day? Today I'm putting that to the test with three completely different airplanes with three completely different time limits. But here's the catch, they all have to flop. Will spending an entire day actually make a better airplane or is an hour enough?
Let's find out. 15 seconds left, uh-oh. Look at that, oh. Three, two, one, go. Okay, so everybody knows how to make a paper airplane, right?
Hopefully I remember. You need to fold this up like this. This like this. Never built one of these before. Okay, and then I got 15 seconds left.
I gotta do something with the, oh, that's right. I gotta fold the wing line. Five, four, three, two, one, go. One, okay, we're gonna call that basically built. All the thing I gotta left to do is clip on our little airplane module here.
And this is a pretty neat little setup. Alrighty, well, I think we need to dock some points already. But the real challenge isn't the build, it's the flight. Well, this thing actually fly, I built this in a minute. Let's go see.
It's pretty light wind out here today, which I'm glad about, let's unlock it. And did I mention I was using my phone to control it? I'm skeptical. Ah, okay, too much throttle, too much throttle. Move back, a little bit more, let's bring it around.
Okay, it's just like going straight up in the air. We need to bring this thing over here. Uh-oh, find my plane. I think it went out of range, that's crazy. Let's go get it.
Your plane is not sending signals. Well, I'm glad it's bright red. Hey, there it is. Okay, I think it's only fair to give this thing one more chance. I guess you see those elevators?
I could probably fold those a lot flatter. Let's try it. It's still wanting to go straight up in the air. I'm just giving it too much throttle. You're kidding me.
Seriously, you lost signal again. Gotta say, I'm not super impressed at the thing so far. Doesn't have great Bluetooth signal. So this thing saves to say it does not fly good. I don't know if it was just the fact that I built it in a minute or what, but what if we spend one hour building an airplane?
Let's see how much of a difference that makes. Okay, I got some foam in one hour on the clock. Three, two, one, start. For the one hour build, my goal wasn't to make the prettiest plane. It was to make the best flying plane I could in the least amount of time.
I started with a simple foam board wing, added a spar for strength, and it's just enough to hydro to make the plane naturally stable. Then I built a basic box fuselage. It's not flashy, but it's fast to build, lightweight, and surprisingly strong. From there, I cut out a simple tail, glued everything together, and installed the electronics. With six minutes left on the clock, I got the plane all finished up here, ready to go fly.
I think I've got six minutes to throw a quick paint job on it. It only takes a couple extra minutes to make a plane look a lot better. A piece of cardboard and a can of spray paint, all you need for a quick, clean paint scheme. Well, it is quick and dirty after all, but let's get it up there and see if it'll actually fly, because this build only took us an hour, and this is super simple for you guys to do at home. If you guys want to try something like this, I've got several videos on my channel that are building airplanes in 30 minutes, so go check them out, and if you want to hit that subscribe button, I would really appreciate it while you're down there.
Okay. A little bit squirrely here. Okay, so pitchy. Alrighty, well, already a lot better than our one minute build, but it is so pitchy. See if we can do a loop.
Ready? Three, two, one. Whoa, look at that. The first flight proved one thing, it slew, but it definitely wasn't flying well. I knew the design had potential, so I headed back to the workbench, I reduced the control throws to calm down the pitchiness and added a little bit more dihedral to help the plane naturally stabilize itself during turns.
Those two simple things completely transformed the way it flew. Oh, this thing flies amazing. Wow, look at that. Dude, this thing's amazing. Okay, we gotta see if we can do some tricks with it, because like honestly, just flying this good is already a trick.
Like how does this thing fly so good for being built so quickly? Like this is such a great plane. Okay, let's see if we can do some tricks. See if we can do a loop. Ready?
Three, two, one. Yup, there you go. That thing's great. And then let's see if we can do a roll. I don't know that we can, because we just have a rudder on here.
Nope, okay. Alrighty, well, you guys gotta build one of these because I am in love. I don't know what I'm gonna build tomorrow to top this. How slow it flies. It's got such a wide wing.
It just makes it fly so good. And after that massive success, the pressure is on for this one day built. So after lots of contemplation on what I'm gonna build for this one day challenge, I'm not sure, honestly. So I think I'm gonna try to build an A10 Warcog. I just honestly don't know if I can pull it off.
So we're gonna go for that. And if we can't do it, we might have to pivot and try something else. But we're gonna start with a fuselage here. I'm gonna try forming the fuselage. Never done this technique before, but we're gonna give it a shot.
So we'll see how it goes. Well, so I built this. I'm going to, I think, scrap this A10 thing. And I think I wanna build kind of like a Freedom Fox bush plane. I thought that would be really cool.
This video is getting posted on 4th of July. So what's more American than a bush plane? With a full day to work, I wasn't trying to build the fastest airplane anymore. I wanted to build the best one. That meant starting from scratch with a completely new wing design for both performance and looks.
You can see I got both halves of the wings glued up here. We got the wings spar in and I even went ahead and added some LEDs into this plane. So it's really gonna glow in the sky and look amazing. This time I could add all the details I've been skipping. I built the wing around LED strips for night flying installed proper servos and even added flaps.
Something I've never put on my scratch builds before. And I just couldn't help myself. I had to plug the LEDs in real quick and see how it looks. I got the wing all folded up and the LEDs are gonna look so good in the sky. I'm able to run all of these effects on there.
Launch different kinds of effects that you can run. Go check on my website if you're interested in that controller. And just like that, the wing is actually complete. Got all the servos on here. We got either on here and then flaps here.
So we'll be able to do super slow stuff. And now that the wings done, let's move on to the fuselage. And the fuselage ended up taking the longest. Instead of a simple box, I wanted something that actually looks like a real bush. And getting all those curves and angles right will take a lot of patience.
A lot more than I expected. Okay, so I got into the exhaustive process of getting the airplane fuselage here where I like it. So this should now all fold together. A lot of figuring out to do again here. I'm just excited I've gotten this far.
Once the pieces were finally cut, everything started coming together. I assembled the fuselage, installed the power system and wired everything up for closing it all in. So I got the fuselage all finished up here. It's looking pretty good. Nice and strong.
Motor mounted on this little power pod. It's coming along. I gave the tail the same treatment. Plane lines, a little bit more refinement and a design that matched the rest of the airplane. The design of this plane is roughly based on the FT Bush plane.
So if you wanna go check that out, check the link in the description below. Okay, so I got the tail on there and I just stuck the wing on and this thing is looking fantastic. I'm super excited how it's turning out. It definitely has a better look and profile than, you know, that I've just gotta throw some LEDs in it and then I can throw a quick paint job on it and it'll be done. One feature I'm really excited about was a custom LED light bar running through the fuselage.
It doesn't help the plane fly any better, but it should make it look incredible once the sun goes down. Finally, it was time to make it look the part. I kept the paint scheme simple, but spent the extra time masking everything cleanly. So it looked more like a finished airplane than a quick film board bill and this is always my favorite part. There's something satisfying about peeling the masking tape off, finally seeing the finished design.
And the last piece was sliding the LED light bar into the fuselage. It was a finishing touch and once I turned everything on, this thing looked even better than I had even imagined. This thing's gonna look amazing. I'm so excited. The paint job and the RGB looks amazing.
I'm so excited. So let's see if this thing will actually fly though, cause starting to get kinda nervous after how much work I put into it. Actually 3D printed a landing gear on my bamboo lab P2S and it looks super nice. So hopefully it holds up and is nice and durable. And that looks like it's good to go for its first flight.
Oh, she flies slow. Okay, let's put our flaps up. Yeah, look at that go. This thing looks gorgeous. Look how beautiful that bird is in the sky.
Look at that. That's beautiful. This thing flies amazing by the way. Wow, I'm so excited. It's about dust here.
So I'm excited for the sun to set and we can see these LEDs on this plane. But this thing's looking so good so far. I don't know how charged this battery is. Sounds like it's not very charged. I think we're gonna bring it around here for a landing and put a different battery in it.
Oh my gosh. This thing flies amazing. We're like half throttle here. Ugh, I'm in love with this plane. Look how gorgeous this thing flies.
Oh my golly. Wow, okay, this is definitely worth a whole day to build because this thing flies so good. And it looks so cool too. Like the one day build flew really good but it definitely didn't look near as good as a scale. But look how good this thing looks as I fly by.
And the paint job, oh my, it looks amazing. We got the plane up in the air. I got all these LED lights in it. This thing looks amazing. As you can see, it's just glowing with this amazing paint job.
I'm so excited how this thing turned out. So was spending an entire day building this plane worth it? The one minute plane definitely proved you can get something in the air with almost no time at all. The hour plane really surprised me of how well it flew for how short of a time it took to build. If you were just getting into scratch building or want to try this crazy hobby for the first time, I would totally recommend building something like this.
But if you're an experienced builder, this plane right here looks gorgeous and flies amazing. If you want a project that you're excited to pull out every time you go flying, this is totally the one to build. Now I want to know which plane do you guys prefer in the comments and which one are you going to build? Comment below your favorite plane and while you're down there, hit that subscribe button. I'm trying to get to 100,000 subscribers.
It would really mean a lot to me if you subscribe. I will see you guys in the next one. Adios.
