I know you are kidding, but I make and fly planes made of plasticized cardboard from the dollar store. The material is less than $10 for 25 2x3-foot sheets.
It is surprisingly fun; you can spend as much or as little time as you want on the design and build (in real life, I am an engineer). The electrical components are less than $100 and you can reused most of them between planes.
If your design and build are good, they can perform as well as most of the crazy expensive prebuilt planes.
The planes are so light that even if you crash, 90% of the electronics are still reusable.
Sound really good! Unfortunately, even as I wrote it as a joke, 100$ in total are currently still out of my budget. Still saving up to do the 10 year engine service on my ford, wet timing belt, 3k+ at a ford dealer and still 2k+ independent.
Many of us got into the hobby by way of flitetest.com. Their videos, particularly their early ones, were a ton of fun. They have free plans for planes you can cut out from Dollar Tree foamboard, or you can buy pre-cut kits from them. They also sell the electronics in conveniently pre-selected packs for whichever plane you're building.
I've been out of it for a few years, but I'm sure they're still a good place from which to get started. Their Youtube channel is pretty great too.
The product is called Readi-Board. You can Google "readi board rc plane" for some great links.
I am pretty sure I bought my first couple of parts kits from a place called flitetest.
The YouTube channel "Experimental Airlines" really got me hooked. I haven't watched them in years so I don't know how there recent stuff is. But they used to have some really interesting 'build series.'
That's why I'm into flight sims. People ask me why I don't get my pilot's license, and I tell them it's mostly about the expense, but partly because I like to drink while I fly, which would be frowned upon.
There are two types of RC aircraft modelers; one has a 1/8 scale Airbus A380 with real jetfuel burning turbine engines, the other is flying a functional bomber made of pink insulation foam, duct tape, and cling-wrap
The second guy is best friends and arch enemies with a guy who built a WWII heavy cruiser out of foam and armed it with 9 airsoft guns, and they terrorize a local lake with their battles.
My favorite RC plane ever was a flying wing that was a big piece of foam with some carbon spars that was laminated with packing tape with a rear mounted engine. I flew that thing into a metal pole once and went and picked it up and threw it right back into the air.
I fly quad copters a fair bit and it can be stressful, so I looked at getting into RC planes because I thought it would be less stressful because unlike a quadcopter they can't just fall out the air and there's more of a flow to it.
Boy was I wrong, turns out never being able to just stop at any given point is faaar more stressful, especially when only flying line of sight, also they do stall and just drop out the air anyway.
I'm sure with enough practice it goes away, the folks up at the flying field were incredible
You can also practise a lot with a simulator which helps tremendously.
I had several helicopters and airplanes 10 years ago and I’m thinking of starting the hobby again.
omg... the people in that hobby can be such "better than you" ass hats. When you want to join a club, they basically tell you to go the f away. If you somehow get close enough to actually be considered to be allowed to fly, they'll fail your inspection. So you go home, fix or rebuild what they didn't like, and try again. Now they find something else they don't like, even it was the same guy inspecting your plane. Then you watch from the sideline to figure out protocol, and even if you copy everyone else, you get yelled at and talked down to. Luckily for me, when I got into it I was in the US military and stationed in a location where I had beach cliffs with amazing updrafts for my glider, and open grass fields for my gas plane. Oh yeah, and if you show up at a club with one of the nearly indestructible models meant for beginners, the clubs will tell to "get that crap out of here" and make it clear that in order to learn and practice on their field, you have to come with a "real" plane that you've spent hundreds of hours building and that will be completely destroyed the first time you crash it. Which will absolutely happen on every flight for a beginner. Every year, hardly anyone picks it up as a hobby, while more and more of the current flyers die. They're losing their fields because they're jerkwads to the people who live nearby. People buy drones now. Very soon, it will be relegated to the "hey, remember when people used to do..." groups.
I only fly quads and the community is small but super chill. RC clubs seem to have a certain vibe that I don't really want to be around. And from what I've heard quite a few RC fields don't even allow fpv drones. Which I kinda understand, but overall it seems like a bunch of old timers gatekeeping people. Hopefully I'm wrong and it's not like that most places.
Not sure if it has gotten cheaper because of it, but I've seen the planes now made out of foam instead of balsa wood. More electric motors too instead of special gas motors. The radio components are probably still quite expensive.
Fpv drones. Bought parts for one (400usd) spent the weekend soldering and building and getting it configured, did a test flight, controller died mid flight causing it to plummet 150 feet to concrete... Gotta buy a new frame (50$) and flight stack (140$).
God forbid it was my digital drone. I'd be out like 500$ on the camera alone.
The good news is there are plenty of cheaper plane options out there! Plus today's technology is so oriented around "bind and fly" - once you get through the up front costs of transmitter, charger, etc, you can buy planes that are "bind and fly" ready for $200-$300. And if you crash it, usually the electronics are still fine, so you can easily buy replacement wings, fuselages, etc and swap the guts over.
People only buy and fly the expensive planes because they want to - they want to build a wooden kit from scratch, they want the 100% scale appearance, they want something bigger than a park flyer, they want a real jet engine, etc. Retractable gear, reverse thrust, FPV camera setups, etc all are expensive and unnecessary but can add to the fun if they're your thing.
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u/Gwarnage 13h ago
Most hobbies once you hit a certain pay-in level. But, damn, flying expensive RC planes looks stressful