I first found Jase Dussia in ~2014 as I started getting into 3d flying, I loved his flying stlye and he was imeditaly one of my favourite pilots. I was lucky enough to see him fly at Western Park in 2018 and 2019, and I hope to see him fly again this year.

Mid way through 2019, I finally found an 48” edge 540 demonstrator for sale for a reasonable price, this is the 48” version of the plane that he flew for the 2014 season (pictured), I had to buy it. It was my first ‘propper’ 3DXA plane, a significant investment and I’m happy to report that it is still in one piece (just) and I still fly it frequently.

Ran D. St. Clair builds crazy flying vehicles, Its pretty simple. everyone one of his new designs employs what apear to be completely new and inovative, or at least have new and inovative components. All of his builds are fascinating, and I wish to have built all of them, at some point.

AvE Is a YouTube Channel mostly based on machine work and building, what I can best describe as, interesting things. This channel is not about anything particular, and is in many ways a comedy ‘show’ at heart, but also covers many very adavanced electronic, mechanical and thermodynamic theory in an aproachable way.

This channel was a big motivation for me making my laser cutter (page coming soon), and although it is terrible if you want to find specific information, you alwasy come away having learnt something.

rctestflight started making videos in 2009 and I found them almost immediately. His early videos consisted of doing much the same as what I did with my RC planes at the time.

Fly, crash, fix and modify, repeat.

I absolutely loved his videos. Sometimes I repeated his experiments with my own planes, learning for myself the problems that he had, and other times it seemed he was repeating mine. We seemed to have a very similar interest in RC planes.

Around 2011 he started building FPV planes (which I wasn’t allowed fly at the place I flew at) and I loved watching him progress to bigger and bigger milestones. A few of his early videos I remember were his long duration plane, ‘delta yak’, ‘twin snow plane V2’, ‘DIY Hovercraft’, ‘FPV From a Moving Car’ and ‘Mini cargo plane JATO’.

More recently he’s been working on his solar plane V3 and V4 projects, another project I really want to have a go at soon, although completely different to how he’s gone about it.

He has had a significant impact on my interest in both RC planes, electronics and mechanical engineering, and to top it off, he still makes some of my favourite YouTube videos that I’ll put down whatever I’m doing to watch.

I first found out about Peter Sripol when he became a co-host on FliteTest, I had seen his very well-known video about one of his early design the ‘cargo twins’ which became immensely popular with hundreds of people having built it since 2009.

As soon as he first appears on flight test I looked back at his previous projects and loved all of them. Since then he has built three manned aircraft using the same kinds of build techniques, we use to build RC planes, with varying success, something I something I would like to do in the future.

He continues to post videos to his YouTube channel, but now he relies on his YouTube channel as his only form of income he has started making videos suited to a broader audience, rather than the RC community. He does still have some great projects though.

FliteTest is professional YouTube channel presented Josh Bixler and a variety of co-hosts. Over time they have done many hundreds of projects and featured projects from many other people. Peter Sripol and David Windestål were also both co-hosts on FliteTest.

Most of the things that FliteTest do aren’t particularly advanced so even when they do more interesting projects they tend to gloss over the finer details since they are aimed at people newer to the hobby, however, their videos are always fun and motivating and they have an amazing amount of community outreach.

RC Hacker never gained a large following in the RC community, but he did have lots of interesting projects, the first that I saw was his video adding a PS2 joystick to the back of his Turnigy 9X, I finally did this modification to my own transmitter 6 years later. He also did many videos on antenna theory (where I learnt about the moxxon antenna I have built so many of) and antenna testing. His most popular project was his ‘nonacopter’, a multicopter with 10 motors, some which rotated, allowing the craft to move in all 6 axis (3 rotational axis and 3 translational axis).

Unfortunately, since he finished the nonacopter project in late 2015, he stopped posting RC related content in favour of his bird watching hobby.

Incidentally, his birdwatching YouTube channel, and the mods that he did to his photography equipment, persuaded me to buy my Canon Eos M camera in 2014, which I still use today, after completing many of the mods he did to his.

Arron Bates started the ‘honey badger’ project in 2012, aiming to add extra manoeuvrability to already ridiculously manoeuvrable large scale 3DXA planes such as the 87” 3DHS Extra 300sc. Most importantly, he wanted even more yaw authority, he started by adding ‘asymmetric air brakes’ at the wingtips of the plane that could be independently operated.

In 2015 he released the ‘super honey badger’ to the world, in this version, he ditched the airbrakes and instead added the tail rotor from a 700-size helicopter to the tail of the plane to aid (or completely overpower) the rudder. This gave amazing results.

It was exactly what I like, the project wasn’t very well refined, but it was an amazing proof of concept for the kind of crazy manoeuvres that could be pulled off by a plane that had extreme amounts of yaw authority.

Hopefully he will release an updated version in the near future.

David Windestål is first on this list mostly because the formatting of this website is directly taken (or as close as I could) from the formatting of his website rcexplorer.se.

I originally found him in ~2011 when I was looking to buy a multiplex blizzard and found his article documenting his build and modifications. I never bought the multiplex blizzard (instead deciding to build a hotliner myself) but I was hooked on his projects and immediately subscribed to his RSS feed.

So many ideas and concepts from his projects and videos have been included in mine. Even simple things like my love for the SAAB Viggen began when he built an amazing example in 2014, a plane which I finally got around to building recently.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t posted much for about 4 years, but I often refer back to his videos for inspiration.