1 hour fly on foam board plane

My name is Pedro Albuquerque and I live in Lisbon - Portugal.

A year has gone since I started reading Flitetest forum and building it's planes (swapables).

You have really taught me a lote and allowed me to evolve with a very limited budget. Thak you so much for your share and inspiration.

After bilding a few of FT models and crashing my Bix2 (my first plane), I decided it was time to build one acording to my specifications.

The Pelican was born 2 weeks ago, based on FT Guinea Pig, and it revealed to be exactly what I expected.

Hope Peter does not get upset with this renaming. Its a big and heavy bird, yet tremendously versatile.

After my first fly with the tis plane with a 5000mAH batery, my budyes challenged me to have it fly for at least one hour.

One of them even offered a 10000mAH batery to try it.

I first thoughted it could fly with this big batery, its 10400mAH 4S with over 950gr .

So I accepted the challenge and they all brought their chair to assist the show

The flying weighwas 2.2Kg

As a twin engine  it has lots of engine power and an incredible lift power that allow for FPV gear (my passion), and heavy battery load for long fly.

I have made the body thinner, with an upper deck for Controller and FPV gear, an adjustable batery tray that allow CG adjustment with and without FPV gear and many batery configurations, and finaly the wing is split in two for easy transportation and storage.

Peter, your design can fly with at least 2.2Kg, and that its hardly the limit.

fly started at 12:01:27 , almost lunch time,but never realy beliebved it woud fly 1 hour

The plane was equiped with and APM 2.5 with Arduplane 3.4 installed.

So I had some degree of freedom not only to fly bit to monitor the fl, excepted that I din not install the power sensor, so no batery voltage or current consuption. For that I only had a batery alarm set for 3.6V

For the first minutes we all standed loking at it, and I made some tests on autopilot funcions like stabelized fly and RTL were when plane arrives the launch point it starts doing circles.

It worked just fine, so I left it runnig RTL mode most of the time

Even though we have brought chairs to seat, we could not keep looing to the plane the hole time.

After about 16:00 minutes flying some one shouted " the plane is flying away!"

It was a panic moment.

I even had the remote control away from me as I was assiting one of my friends with his plane. 

It was a short moment as the plane regained its course again arround Home position.

half-hour later I almost forgot I had a plane in the air.

Its a very looong time.

All the sudden my radio started saying "batery low".

It was time to test the radio failsafe function.

I sitched off the radio to replace bateries and it was fine. Plane remained on its RTL mode. Perfect

It was lunch time and the seamed that the batery was endeless.

We staryed doughting the batery alarm was working.but the plane was still very energetic,

61min after take off finally the alarm fired. Mission acomplished 1 hour fly!!!

There was still more than enough energy for a perfect landing

As the fly took so long, I had time to imagine new chanladges, and they became real imediatly, but that is theme for my next post.

 Thank you FT crew and all the comunity, you have all been an inspiration to me through all your wonderful videos .

Pedro Albuqueque (PA)