Daniel Riley AKA rctestflight

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.