Watch Tom Stanton Experiment with a Channel Wing RC Airplane

Drones and RC aircraft are a dime a dozen in the maker community, thanks to the proliferation of fantastic and affordable hardware. Tom Stanton is a YouTuber who has been focused on aircraft, and particularly 3D-printed aircraft, for a long time now. In his more recent videos, he has been doing a lot of experimentation with unusual aircraft designs that utilize unique quirks of physics to generate lift. In his newest video, Stanton is extending that research with a 3D-printed channel wing RC airplane.

A typical airplane has engines that provide thrust in order to push the craft forwards. Once the plane picks up enough speed, the air moving above and below the wings creates lift so that it can fly. That works well and is practical, which is why virtually all airplanes today work that way. The only downside is that a plane has to move at a decent speed in order to produce lift. A channel wing airplane, on the other, has specially-designed wings that generate lift directly from the thrust from the engines. That makes it possible to fly at very low speeds — slow enough that a person run below the plane and keep up.

That sounds great in theory, but it really isn’t practical. Stanton's tests showed that the lift is just a fraction of the thrust from the propellers. Basically, that means it would be more efficient to just point the motors facing straight down. Even so, he built a prototype from a combination of 3D-printed parts and hand-crafted foam parts to keep the weight low. After some tuning and adjustments, he was able to get the plane to fly and it did take off almost immediately. But the design concept is still very inefficient and likely won’t ever be practical.