Speedy Versa Wing - Project

The Versa Wing is one awesome aircraft. The ability to make a very fast flying wing attracted my attention over the past few weeks, and so I decided to build one. This is that journey:

The Build:

The constuction process was pretty much the same as every other build of the Versa out there at the moment. I chose to keep it being a traditional "pointy nose" design, instead of the blunt nose version, because of the intention to make a simple tractor style motor configeration.

My Personal Setup:

The batterys came from www.hobbyking.com, but the rest of the electronics came from http://www.brchobbies.co.uk, a UK distributor. Im sure you can get a similar motor from Hobbyking though, as they have everything on their website!

• 2200 MaH battery
• 1200 Kv motor 
• 20 Amp speed contoller
• Spektrum Radio gear
• 2x 9g servos.

Here is the first half of the wing complete, with the powerpod.

I roped my buddy Phil in to cut out the winglets and some other peices which was good. It meant I didnt have to do all of the work myself! I've got this figured out well. 

The finished Versa Wing (without any decoration).

The First Flights

Unfortunatly, after arround 20 awesome minutes in the air, the first flight ended in disaster as I lost control of one of the elevons, sending it into a nose dive to the ground. I was on my own, so I have no footage of the crash or any of the first flight (sorry).

This was the aftermath:

It could have been worse.

Turns out Bixler's design is quite good at taking 40mph hits to the nose. The cause of the crash was down to the pushrods flexing under high loads from the turns I was making. Eventually I did a slight dive and picked up so much speed I couldent pull out as I was still accelerating. It made quite a "whack" I can tell you!

Here is how I fixed it:

Firstly I sat down with a cup of tea and calmed down after the adrenalin rush. I then decrumpled the nose and rebuilt the powerpod from scratch.

Then I added some decoration to make the white plane easier to see against the overcast British sky. 

I Slapped some Hot Rod red in there to discuise the unsightly wrinkles from the crash and then it was ready to fly again.

Testing the Rebuilt Versa Wing

I had a few more annoying problems with the powerpod, and how it was attatched, after some incidents involving the powerpod braking off everytime. In the end I just went ahead and glued it on there with much frustration. I havent had a problem since. 

I finally managed to put an edit together, so I hope you enjoy it.  

Here are some of the best photo's I got of the plane in flight:

To sum up, I really like this Wing. I have only built and flown a few planes before, but this design is so easy to build and fly and you can customise it to whatever setup you want. Even with a fast set up, if you keep your hands steddy and know what you're doing, then you'll be fine. You can always fly with hardly any throttle and just cruise arround getting about a half our flight out of the thing - The flight envelope is exeptionally good. 

Hopefully I'll be coming allong to the Europe meetup in a couple of weeks to meet all of you wonderful people, however, Im not sure that this thing is gonna fit in my hand luggage! Looking forward to it all the same. 

Thank you Josh Bixler and team Flitetest. :)