My Longest RC Airplane Flight

I'd like to start by thanking my friend Jack. Not only did he capture that awesome air-to-air footage but he also helped a lot throughout the day. He served as my spotter at times and an extra pair of hands and I really appreciate his help. Now I have two Phoenix 2400s. One of them I've added solar cells to the wings and I've got a few videos about that. The other set of wings I left normal. They're the ones that you can see here. So instead of with solar I decided to just build a larger battery and give it another shot. So not only does solar add weight and complexity and weather dependence but also it's difficult to install solar cells without messing up the top curvature of the airfoil. So despite my best efforts I think the airfoil became quite a bit less efficient and so I was curious to know if I just used a larger higher voltage battery if I could get an even longer flight time. And this appealed to me because in theory you could fly it on a cloudy day or you could fly it at night and you would still have this same awesome endurance. Throttle armed. That sets the home location. Change the flight mode to auto where the one and only waypoint is takeoff. And now it's ready to go. It's set up for shake to wake. So a little bump. Wake it up. It's going to spin the motor up and I'm going to throw it as hard as I can and hope it flies. I'm going to use just a little bit of flaps. Half flaps because I don't have a headwind or anything to throw it into. And I'm going to be super careful and gentle as I pick it up. Nervous. This thing weighs a little over nine and a half pounds and that is a lot of airplane to throw. Oh that way looks pretty good too but I know there's a road that way and I know there's not much this way. Hopefully it doesn't crash into that white fence. Wake it up. Come on baby. Yes! Take off the flaps. Oh it's flying. Nice. Man I'm glad I had that click of flap turned on. Pardon my heavy breathing. I was extremely nervous and excited. This was the first and only time that plane has flown with this super super heavy battery. Let me go over the OSD real quick. We've got number of GPS satellites, wind speed, air speed, ground speed, distance and direction to the home location, flight mode, fly time, milliamp hours consumed, distance across the ground, voltage, altitude, current, and throttle setting. 70% throttle. Pulling 16 amps. About to hit the 350 feet where it will turn around. There it is. Nice. And now it's gonna circle the home position and it's coming back looking smooth. Nice. Nice. Gonna reset the recording because if it goes to bad static the rest of the recording is done-zo. So starting the new recording. We're at a minute and 30 seconds. Nice. There it is. Looking good. This is just over an hour into the flight and I've averaged about 5 amps per hour. And this is about the 2 hour mark and I'm on the low side of 5 amps per hour. Alright we're 175 minutes into the flight. 3 hours is 180 minutes so we're almost at the 3 hour mark. Here's my setup. Got my backup screen, Cheez-Its, cooler, transmitter, and yeah everything's looking good. I set up my ground station here because not only did I have shade and a place to put my things but I could also easily see the plane flying in its orbit across the sky from left to right. Let's have a look around. Nice. Wind is still about 5 miles an hour. The flight controller does a really good job of assessing the wind using the GPS and the accelerometers and gyros. My ground station is right there. We've covered 95 miles across the ground and everything's looking really good. We are 4 hours and 43 minutes into the flight. We have a good number of GPS satellites. The wind has picked up a little bit. Airspeed and ground speed are still in the low 30s. Current use so far looks good. Voltage looks good. Now as we jump to the next clip which is at the 7.5 hour mark, the altitude there, about 340 some feet, that will remain the same but watch the distance to the So over the course of those roughly 3 hours, the temperature increased quite a bit and a barometer drift occurred. The plane thinks it's at 350 feet but it's quite a bit lower. Now this is at the nearly 10 hour mark and you can see the sun's at quite a low angle now. Here's the final lap. We are at 11.3 volts and we're gonna do one more go around. Motor off. Switching to manual. Drop the flap so I don't overshoot too badly. Still gonna overshoot. I'm gonna turn around down there. Don't crash it. Please don't crash it. Don't stall. Avoid the dog. Coming in to land. Please just land. 10 hours and 45 minutes. And the dog. Hey puppy. Thank you for not biting me. Oh dude. That's it. Let me give you a tour of the airplane. You still recording? Yeah. All right so uh modification since last time. Swapped out the antenna from a pagoda to a little lollipop. That probably helped a little bit. Obviously the solar wings are gone. This is the second set. The prop is a 12x12. There is the monster battery. Just there's a large section of the fuselage cut out to fit it. You see anything else noteworthy? Flight controller is here. And here's the inside. Oh the prop survived. Yeah there's the receiver. ESC. And if you want to get a shot of the fpv screen. In the sun. Yeah. 10 hours and 45 minutes. I was so so pumped. If you watch me in the top right corner of the screen you will literally see me jumping with joy. A little embarrassing. I apologize but this is this is a super long flight time. I used the whole battery of course. Covered 340 miles across the ground and flew for 645 minutes. That's 10 hours and 45 minutes. If you have any questions let me know. I'm happy to answer questions and discuss stuff in the comments below. Hit the like button if you will. 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