There’s probably no other subject with more varied opinions than how to best set up an airplane. Yet, if you could rank all the different setup methodologies based on results that were obtained within a four- or five-day time period, you’d quickly discover that certain setups promote faster rates of learning and have better results. This article features some basic setup rules that have proven to produce fast results.
RC pilots are constantly trying new setups that promise to improve their flying. If they could objectively evaluate their performance, they’d probably realize that in some cases, they actually flew better before. However, instead of returning to what worked best, they hope to overcome these new challenges with more practice. The tricky part of airplane setup is knowing what really helps, what sounds good in theory (but isn’t) and what may be applicable to some forms of extreme flying, but a detriment to most or all non-extreme flying.
1 BALANCE
Where you choose to balance your model will have a huge impact on how it handles in the air and how well you fly it. When an airplane pitches up or down, it pivots around a point on or near the wing’s thickest point. When the center of gravity (CG) is located at