Before diving into a new hobby, it’s natural to ask “What’s in it for me?”. The same consideration goes for RC planes. Before I got into the hobby, I found myself pondering whether it was worth the trouble. So I began weighing the pros and cons to decide, guided by both research and my journey in the hobby. Here’s what I discovered.
RC planes offer multiple benefits, including a sense of joy and achievement flying your own built or purchased airplane. They also provide opportunities to socialize with the community and develop new skills. However, it’s an expensive hobby requiring significant money and time, with a slow learning curve that may lead to disappointment.
When deciding to join this community, you should think about the benefits and disadvantages of this hobby before making any commitment. In this article, I will detail each one of them based on my experience and the professionals’ opinions. Keep reading to discover more!
The Benefits of RC Planes as a Hobby
From an outsider’s point of view, people always wonder why we spend too much time with our planes. My girlfriend for example always asks me what I find so captivating about this hobby while she can’t even think of herself spending time building, watching, or flying a plane.
RC planes offer multiple benefits, compelling enthusiasts to spend considerable time in their garages or out in the field.
The Thrill and Joy of Flight
Flying an RC plane is an experience filled with mixed emotions, ranging from the joy of flight to the pride of successful landings. It’s also full of excitement, I get adrenaline rushes from the moment I take the flight until the plane stops moving. The thrill of taking off, the freedom of executing aerial maneuvers, and the concern of potentially crashing your beloved plane take you on an adventure you’ve never experienced before.
It’s a hobby that provides me with a way to relax while creating memories and developing a new set of skills.
The Sense of Achievement
RC planes aren’t just a hobby of flying, the hobby includes also a part of building and maintaining planes.
People like dopamine rushes, they’re what makes us enjoy life. One of the best sources of dopamine is reaching achievements. Mastering the art of flying a plane, successfully flying a plane you built yourself, and successfully landing a plane after complications in the air gives me a great sense of accomplishment and I can talk about it for days to come.
Opportunity for Social Interaction
The RC plane hobby is fundamentally about its global community. Many people I’ve met on the field are as interested in meeting new people and sharing experiences as they are in the hobby itself.
It’s a hobby that’s mostly enjoyable in a group, and what’s more enjoyable than meeting people on a sunny Sunday morning and watching funny scenes of failed landings and funny crashes?
It is a great way to meet people who share the same interests as you and create wonderful moments and memories together.
Skill Development
Building, maintaining, and flying RC planes is an opportunity to build skills in different fields such as mechanics, electronics, and aerodynamics. Building a plane needs solid knowledge in multiple engineering fields. Being a software engineer myself, I need to learn the basics of other fields to be able to build a complete RC plane. Those skills can have a lot of benefits for my actual career as long as developing my hobby.
Flying RC planes can also develop concentration, hand-eye coordination, and confidence since those three elements are needed in each flight to stay safe.
The Health Benefits of RC Planes
Source: this subheading is based on information from the DoveMed website, you can find the original article here.
Flying RC planes is not only enjoyable and skill-enhancing but also offers multiple health benefits. It can offer multiple ways to improve your overall health.
Flying RC planes is a form of exercise, it can be physically demanding, and it’s not unusual to see people running around the field to catch their planes that flew away. It also requires a certain arm strength to hold the remote control and conduct the plane for a certain amount of time.
This hobby also serves as a mental stimulant. building and flying planes require knowledge and focus, encouraging your mind to stay active, solve problems, and troubleshoot issues with your plane. As you strive to be better in the field, you’ll delve into different sciences such as aerodynamics, electronics, and mechanics, which will keep your mind engaged and sharp.
The Disadvantages of RC Planes as a Hobby
Earlier, we’ve talked about the benefits of RC planes. However, it’s not all sunshine and roses, it’s important to note that the hobby also has its downsides. Here are some of them.
Cost
Flying RC planes can be an expensive hobby, engaged hobbyists spend a ton of money to buy new planes, maintain the old ones, build better ones, and of course buy nitro and gas for fuel-powered models.
Delving deeper into the hobby, I find myself wanting more sophisticated models with enhanced features, which are more expensive than the basic ones.
Time Investment
In addition to financial investment, there’s a significant time commitment. Building an almost ready-to-fly RC plane can take upwards of 20 hours. For kits, I already heard about people dedicating as much as 200 hours to a single project.
Additionally, the time spent traveling to the airfield and flying your airplane quickly accumulates, amounting to a significant weekly commitment.
Maintenance and Repair
Repairs are inevitable in the RC planes world, crashes are a part of the game and lead to broken and malfunctioning parts. Learning to repair your broken plane will not only get it back in the air, but it will also help you understand your plane more deeply.
Maintenance on the other hand is a critical obligation even if your plane hasn’t crashed. In fact, it’s necessary to avoid future accidents. Imagine discovering a loose screw in the plane in mid-air, for me, a disaster becomes almost inevitable.
The maintenance routine can include checking screws, ensuring that electronics are functioning correctly.
Learning Curve
Mastering the RC planes game means understanding some complex physics and engineering concepts. For someone who isn’t familiar with those concepts, it can be hard and long which can be devastating. If you’re new to the hobby, prepare yourself to do some homework and to remember what your high school physics teacher was saying during class 🙂
Space and Legal Restrictions
Not everyone is lucky enough to find himself living near an RC airfield. Many turn to public parks as an alternative, although flying there isn’t always legally permitted. You should check your local laws before flying your RC plane in public places.
Joining local RC clubs and communities is an effective strategy. These groups can provide guidance, support, and can guide you to suitable flying locations.
Risk of Accidents or Damages
Crashes are an inevitable part of flying RC planes, particularly for beginners. Those incidents range from minor crashes to severe collisions that cause significant damage to your plane.
Pilot errors are the most common cause of those accidents, but they can include other factors such as mechanical failures and environmental hazards such as strong winds.
Is Flying RC Planes an Expensive Hobby?
On average, flying an RC plane is expensive, but the costs can widely vary from one person to another. The initial cost of starting the hobby includes buying your first plane which price can vary as low as 100$ to several thousands of dollars for a high-end plane.
Personally, I don’t see the point of buying an expensive first RC plane since it’s going to crash anyway. I prefer to start with a cheap one to practice on it and then with the experience I can go to better ones.
The initial investment includes also buying the necessary accessories and a good radio, as well as field equipment.
If you want to start building your own planes, other costs for building materials should be anticipated.
Are RC Planes Hard to Fly?
As a general rule, flying RC planes can be challenging for beginners, it requires acquiring a set of skills and techniques to fly your plane correctly. Learning how to fly them on the other hand is accessible and with proper training and practice it becomes much easier.
The difficulty of flying an RC plane varies depending on multiple factors. The type of plane has a great impact, some planes are designed to be more stable, others that are designed to be faster and able to do more maneuvers.
Before going out and flying a real plane it will be much better to get the proper training, understand how the plane works, learn the controls, choose the right plane for you, and I generally advise starting on a simulator before going out to the field.
The hardest part about learning to fly an RC plane is to train eye-brain coordination since you’re not sitting in the vehicle, when it’s coming toward you everything is backward. A simulator will be a great help to train on that.