It sounds like it's electric powered. As much as I love brushless motors, I think a model of that scale and quality would have deserved actual jet engines.
It sounds like it's electric powered. As much as I love brushless motors, I think a model of that scale and quality would have deserved actual jet engines.
Tyler Perry owns the airplane and the property. He has said that he does not fly turbines due to the fire risk in a crash. His property is surrounded by forest. If he were to cause a forest fire, the negative publicity could have a major impact on his career.
That property is gorgeous and Tyler pulls out all the stops for his builds. That channel (Ramy RC) has quite a few of them.
Thank you for inadvertently answering a question I had, which was who owned that estate.
I'll preempt future comments that lithium batteries can catch fire too. I agree with that statement but still think the risk is mitigated by not going with gasoline fuels.
If it had been gas-powered motors, I would have agreed with you. The electrics sound close enough to my ear like actual jet engines though.
RC-scale tiny turbines are sort of a boondoggle. They are loud, dangerous, and quite frankly reliability disasters. Expected component lifetimes are in the hundreds of hours, most folks overhaul them every 20-50 hours of use, and they fail in the air with shocking regularity (just check youtube).
It's one of those "impressive that it works at all" kind of things. If that's what you want to see in the air, then do it. If you want to watch your one-off custom plane that represents hundreds or thousands of hours of labor fly, you push it with a fan.
AFAIK the only existing small jet engines for RC planes are much too small for this one.
They've been scaling these things up over the past decade. The JetCat P1000 can exceed 200lbs of thrust.
What they really for this kind of build are RC turbofans, which are extremely uncommon. This thing puts out over 300lbs of thrust at full throttle:
https://www.frankturbine.com/en/FT1500.html
There are certainly turbines available that could power the model. He chooses not to.