The fastest RC aircraft is a glider

Posted by anthonykuo , Jun, 2009 @ 1:28 pm

What is the fastest RC aircraft? Amazingly, gliders. The non-powered planes can, in skilled hands, whip up a speed of over 300mph from a relatively slow wind. That’s a velocity of around 8x the speed of the air driving it.

It’s called Dynamic Soaring, or DS, and it requires some specific land and weather conditions, experience and the cojones to slice your precious RC plane through extreme wind shears. If you have a long hill or ridge and the wind is hitting it at a right angle, the air that moves over the top causes an eddy on the leeward side, a steady, spinning whirlpool of air underneath the wind shooting over the ridge.

From Wired.com

This makes me wonder if we could possibly use this in practical applications. The very specific wind and land conditions limit things as is, but the general idea applies: a non-powered vehicle can travel much faster than the surrounding air. What if we had passenger gliders that flew over carefully positioned updraft generators, or followed the jetstreams? These planes would need backup engines, of course. Just an idea.

Tags: airplane, glider, rc, speed, wind