A month of design and building, then three days at Flite Fest 2026 finishing a 20-foot foam airplane on a picnic table: servos at midnight, iNav at 1 a.m., a center of gravity that was nowhere near right, landing gear that folded twice, and a team of aerospace engineers who rebuilt it overnight. It took off into heavy wind, flew, and went straight into the ground. Then part of the wreck flew in the last combat of the weekend.
Last year Preston and I built a 10-foot plane in an RV in two days and it failed before it ever reached combat. The reasoning this year was simple: if you are the biggest airplane in the sky, you should be able to knock down most of the others. So instead of two days, the plane got a month of design and material testing and two weeks of building, at twice the size — 20 feet — and it still had to stay under the 55-pound combat limit, survive a first flight, and get into a fight.
Before any of that, the RV rental was cancelled because the renter has to be 25 and I am 24, Preston found out two days before departure that he couldn't come, and Flite Fest 2026 was held at Wright-Patterson, an active military base, which meant every vehicle was searched on the way in and nobody leaves after dark. I got there a day early with the plane in one piece, a tent for a workshop, a truck to sleep in, and a lot left to do.
The first job was the elevator servos, because if the elevator quits on a plane this size the plane is toast. Brad, who I met at the campsite, helped get them in that night and kept showing up for the rest of the build. By morning the elevator was finished and the tail assembled, and the day went to cutting ailerons into the wings, hinging them, and installing their actuators — a motor driving each surface rather than a bare servo, chosen for strength and reliability on surfaces that big. In between, the first combat of the day went up with hundreds of planes, and I flew one of the smaller planes from the truck just to see what combat is like.
The radio is a dual-diversity receiver, feeding a flight controller running iNav — software that sits between the pilot and the airplane and handles gyro stabilization and how the controls respond. Getting iNav onto the controller and getting the controller to connect took hours. Kyle turned up and it worked at 1 a.m. For the first time since the project started, the whole plane was assembled with the wings on, and it looked like an airplane.
The last wiring runs go from the tail to the nose, which on this fuselage means crawling inside it. Prop test: most of the motors ran backwards, which is a quick fix. Wing mounted, and then the check that decides everything on a big plane — the center of gravity. It was supposed to be at the wing; it was clear back at the tail. The rest of the day turned into a weight-and-balance experiment: the plane came apart again, anything in the rear that could be spared got cut out, and the whole wing moved back six inches. The weight saved was honestly not much, but every bit helped, and with everything open the weak points got attention too — more support around the wing, aircraft cable to stiffen a tail that fluttered, a reinforced fuselage bottom, and the first landing gear.
Then it poured. My brother Joseph arrived and jumped in. The CG still wasn't right, so the last resort went in: a ballast structure in the nose that takes exactly as much weight as needed. Late afternoon the call was made to fly after the evening combat. The wing went on and the landing gear bent. A stronger version folded over the moment the motors got throttle. Every version did the same thing, the daylight was going, the plane has no lights, and the field is thirty minutes out. Out of time.
This is where the weekend turned. One of the people helping was on an MIT team for the DARPA challenge, and he and his group went and got materials and rebuilt the landing gear overnight. Their first version was already far better than anything we had built; they kept refining it with a second set of braces for lateral support, struts, and tension lines that stop the gear flexing too far. While a team of aerospace engineers was rebuilding my gear, I ended up designing landing-gear parts for their plane and printing them on the Bambu Lab H2D, in the tent, in the storm, in carbon-fiber filament, until 2 a.m. The wheels got an aluminum axle running as a sleeve bearing. Upgrade of the night: a hammock instead of the truck.
Morning of day three, the wind was gnarly — small planes were getting thrown around, and this plane has a lot of surface area. Final test: all four motors together at full throttle, and it wanted to fly. After some encouraging words from Noah Bixler and a quick tire change, it took off. Genuinely took off, climbed out, and flew — 20 feet of airplane in the air over Flite Fest. It came back around into the wind, lost control, and went straight into the ground. A month of work turned into a pile of foam in about five seconds.
Honest answer: not certain. But rebuilding the wing afterwards turned up something that looked suspicious. On paper, if the servos on those huge control surfaces ever pulled their maximum current at the same time, they could demand more than the power supply feeding them was rated for. That never shows up sitting on the ground. It shows up when the airplane is moving and the surfaces are fighting a wind like that day's — exactly when the servos work hardest. There were other things too: a control that could spin a full 360 degrees when it shouldn't, and hinges backing out of the foam. None of it is proof; all of it goes on the list.
The plane never made it into combat, but weirdly the important pieces survived, and the elevator section made a very good flying wing. At four in the afternoon with combat at seven, two motors came off the wreck and onto the wing, the elevator got cut down for less throw, the hinges got screws driven through them so they could never back out again, more servos and a set of fins went on, and the OMTech laser knocked out the small parts. It wasn't done in time — Saturday's combat started with the wing still on the table — but it flew right after: plenty of power, plenty of control, half-throttle passes that looked like a plane is supposed to look.
There is one more combat on Sunday morning. It went up, it flew great again, and hitting another airplane turned out to be much harder than it looks — pass after pass with nothing to show. Then a target: the guinea pig plane. Contact. He went down, and for about two seconds I was still flying, until I noticed one of my motors had been ripped completely off. Both down. That counts.
I came to redeem last year with a plane twice as big, all 20 feet of it in combat, taking out another plane. That obviously isn't how it went. But watching the thing get destroyed, everybody helping pick up the pieces, and part of it flying again is what kept bringing me back to the word. As a Christian, I believe the gospel isn't that we can fix ourselves by being good enough or working hard enough; it's that Jesus Christ came for us while we were still broken, died for our sins, rose again, and offers forgiveness and new life to anyone who puts their faith in him. That's real redemption, and it matters infinitely more than anything I could build.
As for the airplane: the 20-foot plane never fought, but part of it did, and after everything it took to get there, I'll call that a win. Last year 10 feet, this year 20. What should we build next?
Disclosure: OMTech provided the laser cutter used throughout this build. OMTech and Bambu Lab links are affiliate links; the code below is both your discount and how the sale is credited.
| OMTech CO₂ laser · sponsor-provided | Used across the whole project to go from CAD file to accurate part in minutes — including the small parts for the rebuilt wing at the field. The OMTech lasers ranked for RC work · code ERICROBBRC for 5% off · what a laser can cut. |
| Bambu Lab H2D | Printed the landing-gear parts and wheels at the campsite overnight, in carbon-fiber filament. The printers and materials · which printer for RC. |
Nothing to correct yet — this write-up matches the video. The servo power-supply theory is a suspicion, not a finding; if the wreck gives up a clearer answer it goes here first. Spot something off? Tell me.
Auto-transcribed from the video, so expect the odd mis-heard word. Here so you can search or skim what was said without watching.
This is a 20ft RC airplane and I built it because last year this happened. Preston goes and I built this giant airplane in just two days and it completely failed before it ever made it into combat. At FlightFest, combat happens three times a day. A sky full of RC airplanes goes up and the whole goal is basically to knock everybody else out of the sky. So, that got me thinking. If you're the biggest airplane in the sky, shouldn't you be able to knock down most of the airplanes? So, instead of trying to build this plane in 2 days this year, I spent the last month designing and building our redemption plane. And we decided to build it twice the size, 20 ft.
That's epic. Now, I just had to finish it, keep it under 55 lbs, survive its first flight, and finally get it into combat. But before I even got the flight fest, things were already not going according to plan. The guest needs to cancel the booking. Well, that was supposed to be my RV for the weekend, but I can't rent it cuz I'm uh 24 and not 25. That was a nice waste of an hour. I really just don't know what we're going to do. The work will provide. That's one thing I know for sure. There it is. This year, flight test was being held at Wright Patterson, which is an active military base, which means every vehicle coming in had to be searched. And as I
pull into my campsite, it hits me that there were supposed to be another person meeting me here. Preston goes and I built last year's plane together. And the plan was for us to come back and redeem it this year. But 2 days before I left, Preston found out he couldn't make it. So this time, I was rolling in to flight test without him. Looks like this is we're calling this home for the next couple of days. Let's check out if the airplane actually survived. It's still here. It looks to be in one piece. Need a porta potty. I think there's enough portaotti. Well, the sun is setting behind me. It is 7:15 now. So, basically, I'm stuck here. I can't leave the base. I guess this big open space here in the tent, I guess, is where we're setting up shop. So, I'm going to get all the planes unloaded here. And since I got here a day before Flight
Fest actually starts, there's not much going on yet, which is probably a good thing cuz I still have a lot of work to do yet on the airplane. And in two days, this thing has to fly. Okay, so we are going to try to get these uh serve put on here tonight for the elevator. And this is like literally the most important thing we can do because if our elevator goes out on our plane, this plane's toast. And you know, it's just going to crash straight into the ground. And thankfully, I was not building alone cuz I met Brad and he helped me get these servos installed. And we're going to continue to see him around because Brad really came through for me on this build and helped make this project happen. Beautiful. Well, we're making good progress on the plane, but it looks like this is my home for tonight. Guess I will see you guys in the morning. Good
morning. I'm excited to get my hammock today so I can have a better night's sleep last night. But, but we got to get moving and get to work. Now, since last night, we got the elevator all finished up. We ready to assemble the tail, and it was looking fantastic. But the work doesn't stop there. So, this is our left wing here. We're going to cut in our ailerons. We've got a ton of work to get done today. get the ailerons cut out, hinges installed, install the servos, get the wings put together. But before I got very far, the first combat of the day started. Hundreds of airplanes were already up in the air trying to knock each other out of the sky. And mine still didn't even have ailerons, so I need to get back to work. That'll be good.
or your bar right here. Yeah, we've got the second AR drying here. And while that's drying, I'm going to go out and do combat cuz we want to see what this is all about. We're going to take this plane, which is kind of big. So, see how it does. Heat. Heat.
Come on. Oh boy. And as much fun as it was to fly that plane in combat, we really need to get back to working on the plane that I came here to fly. So, back to the aerons. Okay, it moves. Let's do this. So that's our motor controlling the control surface. So that'll be super solid and strong, very reliable, which is exactly what we need. But the other thing we need to be reliable is our radio. This is a dual diversity radio. So it basically means there's multiple antennas. So I'm going to hook this up to our flight
controller. The electronics are taking way longer than I thought. And once we had enough of the electronics in place, we could finally do something I've been waiting almost a month to see. For the first time since I started the project, we could finally put the entire plane together. We got the wings on there. It looks amazing. I think this is all wired up. See if it blows up. We got a light. Says uploading firmware.
We don't have time for this, people. I'm putting INAV on this controller, which is basically the brains, the software that makes this thing work. Several hours later, I'm still trying to get the code on this working. I've got finally INAV downloaded. Trying to get the controller to connect. It's still waiting to connect. But then Kyle shows up and we got it to work. Look at this. It's like actually get this thing to fly. Yeah, it's it is 1:00 a.m. Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Thank you, Kyle. This airplane is running INAP, which basically puts a flight controller between me and the airplane. It handles things like the gyro stabilization and how all these controls respond. See, we just had to wait till 1:00 a.m. We are calling it a night cuz uh it's like 1:30 and I need to go to bed so I
have some energy tomorrow to actually finish this plane. If you're liking this video, hit that subscribe button. I would really appreciate it cuz I got to go sleep in my truck again cuz I never went and got a hammock. I think I'm going to go to sleep. It's 2:00 a.m., so I can sleep in any position right now. Good night. Well, good morning everyone. Today we are uh Today we've got a ton of work to do to get this thing to fly. We've got to make sure we get out there, get it happening, and uh let's do it. The city got portaotties. Porta potties here. We got porta potties over there. We got more portaotties over there. We got showers over there. Oh, wait. There's more portaotties. How many? Okay, we're mounting electronics in here. Got it all wired. One of the last
steps on wiring this plane is actually getting the wires from clear back there all the way to the front. So, I got to crawl inside of the fuselage and see if I can make that happen. Bye-bye. Today, we're getting this airplane to fly one way or another. How do I always find myself in an airplane? I was very confused to see the plane shaking going on. That's pretty awesome. Let's get out of here. So, you can see as I move this board here, I wiggle it, it wiggles the elevator. Propeller testing in 3 2 1.
Okay, most of them are backwards. We can fix that. Okay, try this. Hopefully, it works. We're going to go ahead and get the wing mounted now. Get that screwed in place and then we can find the center of gravity cuz the center of gravity is the most important thing. If the center of gravity is not right on this plane, this thing is going to crash. And while combat was going on outside, we found our next biggest problem. After we checked the center of gravity, the airplane was way too tail heavy. Our center of gravity, which is our pivot point of our plane, is supposed to be right here. Currently, it's like clear back here. So basically the rest of the
day became a giant weight and balance experiment. So we're going to try to remove as much material here as we can. We tore the airplane back apart, started cutting out anything in the rear that we thought we could live without and move the entire wing back 6 in. We honestly didn't manage to remove a huge amount of weight. But every little bit helped. And while we had everything apart, we started to fix some weak points, too. We added more support around the wings, stiffened the tail, flutter in this tail, and so I'm basically just going to add some aircraft cable to strengthen it, and started building the landing gear and reinforce the bottom of the fuselage. And of course, as soon as it seemed like everything was going according to plan, it started pouring down rain.
Eric Rod reporting live. Hurricane. But by this point, my brother had shown up. Joseph jumped in to help. And somehow the airplane was actually starting to come together. The CG still wasn't perfect, so our last option was adding weight to the nose. We built a structure up front that would let us add exactly as much ballast as we needed. By late afternoon, we finally made the call. After the evening combat, we were going to try to fly it. You put the wing on and the gear immediately bent. That's a major problem cuz we're flying in literally like an hour. Huge setback. These are the kind of decisions that we have to make in the moment and they have to be the correct decisions or those things just not going to work.
See what it does. Let's flip it over. Definitely a lot stronger. But as we roll it outside, it's not looking so hot anymore. So this bar here that I just added is too long. I got to shorten it down. We made one last attempt to see if this landing gear could actually support the plane, but the second I gave it throttle, the whole thing just folded over. Everybody clear. We're talking this way. Everybody clear. And at that point, we were out of quick
fixes. Every version we tried was doing the same thing in daylight was disappearing. No lights we with no lights on it. We can't fly 30 minutes out. We're right around there. We're not. So you're saying right now? Yeah. Unfortunately, we're out of time. So that was it. After spending the entire day trying to get this thing ready. We were unable to get this plane up in the air tonight, but we're going to get this thing fixed. Got lots of help here, but we've also got some professionals on the team. One of the guys who are on the MIT team for the DARPA challenge is helping us out with the landing gear. So, he's going to go get materials now. We're going to get that fixed up. I'm going to work on some stuff for him. We're going to get this thing in the air tomorrow morning. Let's do it. You guys have
this plane. And their first version was already massively better than anything we' built. Yeah, that adds a lot of weight, too. trying to build out that 45, but they wanted to keep refining it by adding another set of braces for a little bit more lateral support. And while a team of aerospace engineers was rebuilding the landing gear on my RC plane, I somehow ended up designing landing gear for theirs. HD is out here in the middle of the storm working hard and it's printing fantastic. I was printing some parts for uh one of the DARPA guys who was working on my landing gear actually. So, they got this accomplished and it's looking fantastic. Uh we got some struts and uh tension.
That line is actually working. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Wow. So it can't flex too far. Did a great work. Great engineers. The community has literally stepped up and been amazing. So thank you guys. It was great meeting so many of you. I'm so looking forward to actually getting this plane to fly tomorrow. It's happening tomorrow. I'm not letting this flip one more day. The first prototype is completed. Oh my gosh, that looks amazing. But this is uh some PCHT CF. Oh my gosh, it's hot. This gorgeous print. It just printed. It's so hot. It's like burning my fingers. Okay, I'm going to print on my H2D here and I'm going to bed. It's 2:00 a.m. once again. So, I'm actually got a huge upgrade
tonight. I got to go jump in my hammock. I'm going to go to bed. I'll see you guys in the morning. Good morning, everyone. We got some 3D prints here. Looking amazing. Now that we have a solid landing gear, we needed solid wheels. I added a aluminum axle there. So, that's going to be my bearing, sleeve bearing, basically. See how it does in the real world. And finally, it was time to get this thing outside and get it bolted together for its maiden flight. Okay. Well, I'm just stepping outside this morning by this giant plane. And the wind right now is gnarly. You can see stuff getting blown around. These little planes get blown around a little bit in the wind, but this big plane has a lot of surface area, so it's really going to get thrown around. So, we got to really be careful. We'll hope
that this plane's going to be strong enough to fly. I'm not sure if it's going to work out or not at this wind level this morning. Uh but we're going to give our best and we're going to see if we can get it up in the air. And the final thing I want to test is all four motors together at full prop. And it looks like it wants to fly. And after some encouraging words from Noah Bixler, I was ready. You know what? With this wind, you might be able to just vertically take off and then vertically, you know, but the winds were already starting to cause major problems. All right. But after a quick tire change, I couldn't believe this takeoff.
Oh my god. stuff off the ground. Look at that thing. I'm cheering for Eric. She's flying over by
Oh my goodness. What is happening right now? This is wild. Coming back into the wind. Everybody just be aware. All right. He's going around. I'd spent the last month designing this airplane and the last few days here at FlightFest doing everything I could to get it in the air. The crazy part is for a moment it actually worked. 20 ft of airplane was flying. But standing there looking at what was left of it, there was really only one thing I could think about. Why did it crash? This was an insane experience. We had an epic crash last year. We had an even more epic
crash. Now we just need to fish and fix it up for combat. Oh yeah, we glue hot glue, some duct tape. We can do it in the next couple hours. This right here, this this elevator is going in combat today. Motor, we got crop for next year. I think it wow. I see two, three, going to save the tail, right? Yeah. 20ft airplane had turned into a pile of
foam in about 5 seconds. But weirdly, some of the most important pieces had survived, and I wasn't ready to throw in the towel. If the tire plane couldn't make it into combat, maybe part of it still could. Fantastic takeoff. I was trying to make that turn and it was just like barely going. Tried that again down there and my elevator. I just didn't have any elevator. I'm sure we will do something epic again next time. Oh, heck yeah. Man, this has been a crazy adventure. But I'm not done yet. Are you? This has an amazing flying wing on the back of it, and we're going to strap it motors on it. We're going to put in combat for the last combat on Saturday evening, PlayFest 2026. But this is not going to be easy. It's four o'clock right now. Combat is at 7. So
I've got three hours to get some motors on this. Get it air worthy. Get it slight proven. And then we're going to put this in combat and have an amazing time. And immediately I start to find some questionable things. Shouldn't spin around like that. That seems crazy. That's 360°. That ain't legit. Could have been a part of the crash. Yeah. And that right there, those hinges are backing out. What you do is you drill them and stick to them. So I could literally just drive a screw. So, I'm going to do that. We're actually learning how to actually redesign this wing so that we won't have the same failure uh as the full plane. So, we got an hour to make this happen. We're going to start cutting down the elevator so that we don't have so much throw. We got to probably add some more servos, fix
the hinge point. Uh there's a lot of little things that need done on this plane. I'm just going to pull these motors off of this plane here. I think uh they're actually going to fit pretty well for the size of that wing. I'm going to add two of these motors here. Add them here. Not a lot of time to do it, so hopefully we don't get a lot of road bumps along the way. I should probably mention one of the tools that made this whole project possible. Tech sent me this laser cutter, which I used throughout the entire build to quickly make a bunch of little parts for this airplane. Being able to go from CAD file to accurate physical part in a few minutes made building something ridiculous way easier. If you build stuff like I do and want to check it out, tech is linked below and you can use my code Eric Robc for 5% off. Building this flying wing, I noticed something that made me wonder if I had
found part of what maybe went wrong. On paper, if these servos ever got close to pulling their maximum current at the same time, they could actually demand more power than the power supply I was using was rated for. That might never show up sitting on the ground, but once the airplane's moving with these huge control services fighting this massive wind that we had that day, that's when the servos are working the hardest and asking for the most current. I can't say for sure that's exactly what caused the crash, but it definitely started to look suspicious. The last combat of the day was getting closer, and so was I. The wing was almost ready to fly, but at this point, I was starting to get pretty nervous that I wasn't going to finish it in time. And before I knew it, Saturday's combat had started. I'd
basically spent the entire afternoon trying to get this wing ready in time. After picking up the pieces from the crashed 20ft airplane and deciding to resurrect the elevator, I just didn't make it in time. That was definitely frustrating. But I was so close at this point that I still wanted to finish it. At least prove this thing could fly. But if I was going to miss it, at least I got to watch this. However, there
just shortly after combat was over, I added a few more fins and we were ready to fly this thing. Okay, so we got two motors. We got a fin. We got a fin. We got a fin. We got a lot of pins. Um, we got a battery. Hopefully, this thing's going to fly. So, let's get it up there and see how it does. And somehow it flew incredibly after watching the 20ft airplane lose control and go straight into the ground. I was honestly expecting the worst, but this thing had plenty of power, plenty of control, and it just worked. Seeing part of the airplane back in the sky felt pretty awesome. Great. hand off right now. See that? it's beautiful. And I'm a half throttle pinball like that. That's how a plane
should fly. And that's when I remembered something I hadn't mentioned yet. There's one more combat. Sunday morning. Flightfest has one final round. And after seeing how well this thing flew, there's no way I was leaving without putting it in it. This was it. No more rebuilding, no more test flights. We had one combat left. Last combat of the event. And I'm going to get this wing in the air. Well, the good news is that this thing was flying great once again.
Way to go, Eric. Awesome. The bad news was hitting another plane was actually a lot harder than it looked. I kept making pass after pass, but I just couldn't hit anybody. But then I had a plan. I had a mission. I said, "I'm going to go for that guinea pig." And then I finally got one.
He was going down. And somehow I was still flying. Oh no. For about 2 seconds. Going down. He ripped one of my motors completely off. So apparently we are both going down. A I lost a motor. I came here trying to redeem what happened last year. I thought redemption was going to look like building a big airplane twice as big, getting all 20 ft of it into combat, and finally taking out another plane. That obviously isn't how it happened. But after watching this thing get destroyed, seeing everybody help us pick up the pieces, and then watching part of it fly again, I kept coming back to that word redemption. And
redemption actually means a lot more to me than airplanes. As a Christian, I believe the gospel isn't that if we're good enough or work hard enough, we can somehow fix ourselves. It's that Jesus Christ came for us while we were still sinners, broken people. He died for our sins, rose again. He offers forgiveness and new life for anyone who puts their faith in him. That's real redemption and infinitely more important than anything I could ever build. But as far as the airplane goes, the 20ft plane never made it into combat. But part of it did. And after everything it took to get here, I would call that a win. But let me know in the comments. Last year we built a 10-ft airplane. This year we doubled it and built a 20ft airplane. What should we build next?
