If you're building your first plane, build this one. It's a 30-inch foam-board plane that costs only a few dollars in foam, it flies beautifully, and a crash costs you an evening — not a month. This is the whole thing in one page: measured dimensions and a printable cut guide, the exact parts to buy, how to wire it, how to balance it, how to set up your radio, and how to get it into the air (and back down) in one piece.
The easiest first RC airplane to build is a 30-inch, 3-channel foam-board trainer: about two hours to build, $3–8 in foam, and around $140 for the complete electronics the first time (the radio and charger carry over to every plane after). It flies on a 3S 1300–1500mAh LiPo. This page has the measured dimensions, the exact parts list, wiring, balance point and first-flight steps.
Airframe materials: about $3–8 depending on local foam-board prices. First complete setup: around $140, including the reusable radio and charger. Replacement airframe: only a few dollars once you reuse the electronics. Weight is ready-to-fly (~450–550 g); prices change, so treat these as ballpark.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Ever spent 30 hours on a beautiful balsa plane and crashed it on the first flight? Foam board costs a couple of dollars a sheet, so a crash costs you an evening, not a month — and on your first plane, you will crash. That single fact is why I put every beginner on this build. It also flies genuinely well: it's slow, stable, and forgiving, the three things a trainer needs to be.
It's better engineering than it looks, too. Foam board is a sheet of foam with paper laminated to both sides. The foam gives it thickness and light weight; the paper skin is where the strength lives, exactly like an I-beam — the two paper faces carry the loads and the foam just holds them apart. That's why a floppy sheet turns rigid the moment you fold it into a box or an airfoil, and why you leave the paper on wherever you can.
And it's a 3-channel plane — rudder, elevator, throttle, no ailerons. Fewer moving parts to build, fewer ways to crash, and the dihedral in the wing does the leveling for you. It's the easiest configuration there is to learn on.
Everything you need to cut the plane — all straight lines and folds. These are the dimensions I build to: copy them onto your foam, or open the printable cut guide (a one-page cut list you can print or save). The one number to fine-tune on your own build is the CG — set it with the wing and battery position. If you'd rather trace outlines than measure them, the 30-inch one-hour trainer CAD plan set is a different, refined airframe drawn at true 1:1 — this build stays free either way.
The ER Sparrow Mk II — 30-Inch One-Hour Trainer CAD Plan Set is a refined 30″ airframe drawn at true 1:1 — print, tape, cut, no ruler. Full-size sheet plus a tiled letter-size version and an 8-page build guide. $9. This free build stays free.
| Part | Dimension / detail |
|---|---|
| Material | 20″×30″ Dollar Tree / Dollar General foam board, 3/16″ thick (about 2 sheets) |
| Wing | 30″ span, folded airfoil over a foam spar, slight dihedral (tips up a few degrees) |
| Wing chord | 8″ (front-to-back width of the wing) |
| Fuselage | 30″ long box, ~2½″ square section, 45° cut at the tail |
| Elevator (stabilizer) | ~5″ × 12″ |
| Rudder (fin) | ~8″ tall × 5″ wide |
| Controls | Rudder + elevator + throttle (3-channel — no ailerons) |
| Wing mount | Two bamboo skewers + rubber bands |
Why it fits: about two 20″×30″ sheets of 3/16″ foam board build the whole airframe — wing, box fuselage, and tail.
The spec that matters: the paper skin. The two paper faces carry the loads like an I-beam and the foam just holds them apart — leave the paper on wherever you can.
Lower-cost route: Dollar Tree and Dollar General carry 20″×30″ board for a couple of dollars a sheet — this delivered 10-pack is for when there's no store nearby.
If you strip the paper or substitute plain craft foam: the strength goes with it — a floppy sheet only turns rigid because the intact skin carries the load through the folds.
This is the same class of parts I fly on all my 30–40″ foam board planes, and it's sized to work together — the motor, ESC, battery and prop are a matched set, not a random pile. Every link goes straight to the part. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no cost to you.
Want everything above in one cart? The beginner kit page has the same parts as cards with a one-click Amazon cart — radio, power system, charger, foam and tools.
Get the whole kit →Plus hot glue, rubber bands, and a little velcro for the battery. Building a different size? The free Checklist Builder re-sizes this whole list for any wingspan, and the gear guide explains every pick.
Why it fits: a D2836-class motor on 3S is what I fly on all my 30–40″ foam-board planes, this one included. On this 30″ trainer it has more pull than the airframe can use, so you never run out of climb — the throttle is the limiter.
The spec that matters: a 2836-class outrunner, ~1500Kv, on 3S with an 8x4 prop — motor, ESC, battery and prop are sized as a set, not picked separately. Keep it on the 8x4 for this plane; the 9x6 is for a bigger airframe.
If you upsize the power: this airframe needs a 3S and modest throws — a 4S and a 10″ prop is more than it can take.
Everything below comes straight from the video, in order. The airframe is about 15 minutes of big forgiving glue joints; the electronics are the fiddly part.
Score a strip of foam down the middle, crack the score open, and glue it back on itself so it forms an angle. That doubled-up strip is the spar — it runs inside the wing and carries the bending load so the wing doesn't fold in flight. Weigh it down flat while it dries.
The wing is one 30″-wide piece. Mark the leading-edge fold line, cut the two 45° bevels off the leading edge so it folds cleanly, and score the lines that let the top skin curve. Glue the spar down, then run glue along the fold spots and fold the top surface over the spar. Hold it down evenly for a couple of minutes — a lifted trailing edge here means a warped wing later. That fold turns a flat sheet into a real airfoil: curved on top, flat on the bottom. It doesn't need to be perfect.
Cut relief marks near each tip section (you'll cut through to the spar — don't sweat perfection), fold the tips up a few degrees, and glue them propped up evenly on both sides.
Why this matters more than any other step: dihedral is what makes a rudder-and-elevator plane self-leveling. When it banks, the low wing meets the air at a higher effective angle, makes more lift, and rolls the plane back toward level. It's free stability — and it's the whole reason a 3-channel plane flies without ailerons. The rudder yaws the nose, the dihedral turns that yaw into a gentle bank, and you're turning.
Cut the elevator (~5″×12″) and the rudder (~8″×5″) from scrap, cut in the control surfaces (leave the paper on one side as a living hinge, or tape them), then glue the rudder vertically on top of the elevator. Check it from the front — a leaning rudder builds in a permanent turn.
The fuselage is a 30″ box: score even lines down a sheet, fold each score to 90°, and hot glue it square. Cutting 45° bevels at each corner is cleaner, but plain scoring is faster. Cut a 45° angle off the rear so the tail sheds weight and sits nicely, then glue the tail on.
Push two bamboo skewers through the fuselage — one ahead of the wing, one behind — and stretch rubber bands over the wing between them. This is old-school trainer wisdom and still the best beginner wing mount there is: in a hard landing the wing pops off instead of snapping, and you can slide the wing forward or back to fine-tune your CG without rebuilding anything.
This is the honest part: the electronics take as long as the whole airframe. None of it is hard, all of it is fiddly — mounting servos, making Z-bends in pushrod wire, fitting control horns on the hinge line, setting linkage lengths so the surfaces sit neutral, mounting the motor, and connecting the ESC and receiver. Budget for it and it won't frustrate you. Two shortcuts worth stealing: 3D-printed or popsicle-stick control horns, and mounting the tail servos right at the tail (mounting them forward is better for CG, but rear is faster and this plane carries it fine with the battery pushed forward).
Why it fits: this is a 3-channel plane — two 9g servos, one for the rudder and one for the elevator, and the 5-pack leaves spares for the next build.
The spec that matters: the standard 9g size — the pushrods, control horns and linkages in this step are all sized around it.
If you mount them at the tail like the shortcut above: rear weight pulls the CG back — push the battery forward to compensate, exactly how this plane carries it.
A basic plane is five electrical parts and four connections — that's the whole system. Follow the power and it makes sense:
| Connection | How |
|---|---|
| Battery → ESC | Main power lead (XT60). Plug in last, unplug first. |
| ESC → Motor | Three wires. If the prop blows air the wrong way, swap any two. |
| ESC → Receiver (throttle) | One servo lead. This also powers the receiver — no separate battery. |
| Rudder servo → RX ch. 4 · Elevator servo → RX ch. 2 | One 3-wire lead each: signal / + / ground. |
Why it fits: the ESC's built-in BEC feeds the receiver through the throttle lead — that's why this plane needs no separate receiver battery.
The spec that matters: an ESC with a BEC, rated above what the motor pulls. The D2836 on an 8x4 stays well inside 30 A, and 30 A is what the same motor wants on a 9x6 in a bigger plane — buy it once.
If you plug in with the throttle up: the motor can spin the instant power connects — battery in last, out first, throttle at zero every time.
Want it drawn for your exact parts? The free Wiring Designer generates a color-coded diagram in the right hookup order and flags the mistakes that fry electronics, and RC Plane Connections, Simplified walks through every plug. If a word like "ESC" or "BEC" is new, RC Electronics Explained covers it.
CG is the one number you must not skip. A tail-heavy plane is unflyable and un-fixable in the air — it's the #1 killer of maiden flights. Balance this plane about 25–30% of the wing chord back from the leading edge — roughly 1¾–2¼″ back on a 7–8″ chord, with 27–28% the safe starting point. Lift it on two fingers there: it should sit level or just slightly nose-down. Slide the wing or the battery to adjust. When in doubt, nose-heavy is safe and boring; tail-heavy is exciting right up until it crashes.
Lift the plane on two fingertips at the CG marks and watch what it does. Level or just slightly nose-down: fly it. If the tail drops, it's tail-heavy — unflyable and un-fixable in the air — so slide the wing or the battery and check again.
Why it fits: a 3S 1300mAh is the pack this whole setup is sized around — about 110 g and 8–10 minutes of flying — and sliding it is how you set the CG without rebuilding anything. A 3S 850–1000 is 35 g lighter and floatier if you would rather have a gentler plane than a longer flight.
The spec that matters: 3S — this plane needs a 3S and modest throws; more cells and a bigger prop is more than the airframe can take.
If the battery can shift in flight: your CG moves with it — strap it in tight before every single flight.
Set control throws generous but not wild. Good beginner starting points:
This is the 20–30% expo from the list above, drawn. At 0%, the surface copies every twitch of your thumb one-to-one — the plane surfs your nerves. At 30%, the same small wiggle near center barely moves the surface, but the ends of the curve still reach full throw. Calm around center for cruising, all the authority still there when you need it.
Too much throw makes the plane twitchy and easy to over-control; too little makes it sluggish in wind. The RC Calculators put an exact CG number on your specific wing, and the Airplane Designer does it if you change the size.
Do all of this on the bench, before you ever go to the field:
Run this every single flight. It takes 60 seconds and prevents most crashes:
Every run hides one fault from the checklist above. Sixty seconds on the bench beats two seconds in the air.
Sort two things before the maiden — the rules and the spot — and get a second set of eyes if you can.
The full rundown — license, registration, Remote ID, where to fly, finding a club, and range checks — is in Start Here.
Rules above apply to recreational flying in the United States. Pilots elsewhere should check their national aviation authority and local rules.
Pick a calm morning — wind is a beginner's worst enemy — and a big open field with tall grass if you can (soft landings). Then:
The launch is most of the maiden. Hold it level, throttle up to about ¾, and throw straight ahead into the wind like you mean it — the plane leaves your hand at flying speed and climbs on its own. The instinct to "help it up" is the trap: thrown at an angle, it points the nose at the sky below flying speed, stalls, and drops before you've touched a stick. A weak lob stalls; a confident level throw flies.
Every lazy circle ends with the plane pointed back at you — and the moment it is, your left and right swap. Don't try to translate directions in your head mid-flight; nobody's that fast. Steer with the wing instead: the moment it's coming at you, push the stick toward the low wing until it's level. Nose-on, that one habit does the left-right translation for you — it's how every pilot beats nose-in. Flying away, your instincts already work: steer out of the lean like you'd steer a car. Drill both directions below until it's reflex.
Buttons or the ← → arrow keys.
It will break, and that's fine — this is the most repairable airplane material there is. Keep hot glue, a knife, and packing tape in your field box:
If it flew and then something went wrong you can't explain — it rolls off on its own, won't climb, stalls in turns — walk it through the Flight Doctor. Describe the symptom and it points you at the cause.
The maiden taught me a few things the hard way — here's what I'd tell you before your first flight.
The free tools below are the Eric Robb Builder System — design, choose parts, wire, calculate, preflight & diagnose, then document.
The free one-page starter checklist covers this exact build — the parts, the setup order, and the preflight that saves your maiden. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Auto-transcribed from the video, so expect the odd mis-heard word. Here so you can search or skim what was said without watching.
Hey guys, my name is Eric. Welcome back to my channel. Have you ever built a Balsa airplane and spent like 30 hours on it? It looks beautiful. You take it out to the field.
The first time you fly it, it crashes. No, I've never done it. I've never built anything out of Balsa, but I have spent a lot of time building airplanes. So today we're going to see how much of an airplane we can build in 10 minutes. Let's get into it.
Hey guys, if you're new to subscribe to my channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Today we're going to be building a 10 minute airplane. I've got my phone here and we're going to see how much of an airplane we can build in 10 minutes. Okay guys, let's get started in three, two, one, go. Okay, so let's start off by cutting out our spar out of our first piece of foam here.
So I'm going to cut a score in the middle and then we can crack that open and glue it together. So this will create our spar for our airfoil. And then we can weight that down and start on our wing. So I'm just going to make some marks here to put the locations for the, to bend the leading edge so I can cut the two 45s off the leading edge so I can fold that over. Then I'm going to cut our marks across so that we can make our airfoil just like that.
So after that's all looking good, we can then install our spars. So we can just take and glue this down, make sure it's nice and dry. And then we can add a glue to the different spots where the wing folds over. And then we can fold that over. So just like that, we can just hold that down for a couple minutes until it's nice and dry, nice and even, because we don't want that coming up.
And actually I put a bead of glue in the wrong spot, so you saw that there in the tip trailing edge. So now I'm putting the dihedral in. So I'm just going to cut some marks here and then I can fold that up and glue that together. So I'm just cutting some marks. I have to cut to the spar, so it's kind of difficult to get perfect.
But so as you see there, I'm just adding some glue and putting a weight in the middle and trying to get it propped up the best I can on both sides. And then we can put our attention towards the tail. So I'm just going to take some foam here and cut a rudder and an elevator out. So it's pretty simple and straightforward. Just adding some spots for the control services to go in.
And then we can take and we can glue the rudder down to the elevator. And make sure that's all vertical and not falling over. So now we can start on the fuselage itself. So we're just going to take and we're going to cut across here some even lines. So this is going to be a pretty simple fuselage.
We're just going to make a box and it should be pretty easy and straightforward. Yeah, so I'm just going to score some lines and then fold it over at 90 degrees. It would probably be better to actually cut a 45 degree out. But I thought this was a lot faster and that's kind of what we're going with for this build. So as we just fold that together, just making sure it's try to be the best we can and the quickest amount of time.
So after we get that all looking good, we can then take and put some glue hot glue down and get that all square. So I'm just trying to do my best to get this square because I did not cut these lines perfectly. So I'm just kind of paying for that now. So just trying to get it lined up as good as I can. And then I had to cut some a little bit off so that I can make it perfectly square and make it look good.
So after we got all that cut off, we can then take and install our rudder. So I also wanted to put a cut of 45 at the back here. This gets a little bit of weight off of the tail and it also just makes it look nice and makes it work a little bit better. So we're just going to have to do that. We can then glue it on to the fuselage itself.
So as you see here, it's coming along. The fuselage was super simple to make and literally anybody can do this fairly easily. So after we have that all done, we pretty much have the plane finished. I just had to clean out some glue there and then we can install our barbecue skewers to hold our wing on. So this works fairly well.
Decent, it's pretty strong because of how the construction of the plane worked together. And then we can just take and rubber band the wing on there. And it came together super simple. We have the whole airframe done. All we have to do now is install the servos and we can see we can fly it and it's doing pretty good.
So I'm just getting some control horns here now. I actually didn't prepare this. So I just got to get it all situated. I had to drill out my control horns. So I printed some 3D printed control horns that I use for my airplanes and they work fairly well.
So it's a lot simpler and easier than cutting them out of something like a popsicle stick, which is another solution that you can use, which I used to use before I got a 3D printer. So I can then just simply attach my servo on here. I'm just going to put the servo on the tail. Yes, it would be better to put it closer to the leading edge and closer to the front of the plane so that I can get my center gravity better. But this works and it's a lot quicker and easier for this build.
So I'm just going to go with it. So I just got my elevator servo glued down and then we're pretty much just going to repeat the same thing for the rudder. So we're just bending the servo wire and then attaching it to our servo and getting that all situated. And then we can attach it and get the length of the servo wire to be correct. Like this is pretty much the most intricate and like so you see I'm at 24 minutes now and that's because like I just said that this is actually going to take a little bit longer than 10 minutes.
So it actually took about 30 minutes. But so we're at 24 minutes now because the electronics actually take quite a bit. So I think the electronics itself took 15 minutes, like half the time just installing the servos and getting the wiring all correct. So I'm just putting a hatch here. We can install where we're going to install our battery and we can install all of our electronics in that little hatch.
So it actually worked out fairly well. It's a pretty good little spot to do everything. So I'm just attaching the motor pod itself and then we get all the wires all connected up and hooked up to the receiver. After we get all the front pod all mounted in. So here we are connecting our receiver and that is all looking good.
So we just got to close everything all up. Okay guys, we got everything all finished up. Let's take it for our first meeting flight. Okay guys, so we got the plane up in the air and it's really flying really well. So I'm super excited with this plane.
If you guys want to build this yourself, it's pretty simple to make. So you can spend a half an hour, it might take a little bit longer, depending on your school level, but it was pretty simple and it was a great plane. I'm super glad I built this because it was really fun and it flies really well, especially for how little bit of time that I spent on building this plane. So if you're at flight test and there's a 30 minutes before a combat, you can just be like, I'm going to pop out of airplane and we can put it up in combat and fly it and have a blast. So thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you like this video. I'm going to show you guys the rest of this flight because the plane flew super well. But thank you for watching. I hope you like this. So you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and I will definitely get back to you.
So have a good day. I will see you next time. I also want to say something about this landing. I thought I was going to hit this teleprompole and I pulled up really fast. I had a bunch of thrust because this is a forest battery with a 10 inch prop.
So I had a ton of thrust and I would have really fast-flying the motor pod broke off because I didn't use tape for my motor pod and yeah, that was a mistake. So just make sure you use tape for your motor pod so that it doesn't rip apart. Okay guys, so that's awesome. Thank you guys so much for watching. You guys are awesome.
Have a great day. Please like and subscribe. Bye.
