Maiden Flight: Freewing F-16 90mm (V2) 8S Power

Name: Maiden Flight: Freewing F-16 90mm (V2) 8S Power
Uploaded: 2026-08-02T02:59:36.966Z
Duration: 8 min 13 s
Channel: Flap Fliers
Description: I recently got the new(ish) Freewing 90mm F-16 Fighting Falcon v2 with 8S power system. This is my first 8S jet and I was nervous to fly it, but everything went smoothly. Here's the video plus some additional commentary by me on how the plane flew.

Flap Fliers

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Aug 2, 2026

I recently got the new(ish) Freewing 90mm F-16 Fighting Falcon v2 with 8S power system. This is my first 8S jet and I was nervous to fly it, but everything went smoothly. Here's the video plus some additional commentary by me on how the plane flew.

I do have tail arms. I'm so nervous about this. I'm hoping things go okay. Three, two, one, taking off. It goes. Okay. In the air. Coming back a little bit. Leveling out. Roll is pretty sensitive. Probably do need a little more pitch authority. Let's try a roll. Three, two, one, left roll. Okay. That's a lot of tail arms. I'll put that sucker down. Let's do a little bit slower on the right side. Roll. Three, two, one, a little slower. There we go. Go around. We'll do a loop. Three, two, one, power up. There you go. Okay. I am doing it. All right. Back on the bench after the flight. You can see the absolute rat's nest of connectors I have in here. I'm going to optimize this, but it's what I had for my first flight. Voltages are about 3.82, right about storage voltage, which surprises me. I flew for about three minutes, maybe three and a half. It wasn't that long of a flight. I thought with an 8S, I'd get more flight time. And truth is the power on it was not what I thought it would be. It flies like most of my 6S jets do of this size on an 8S. So I was expecting more power. Yeah. I'll give some more feedback in a minute, but for now that's it. The aileron roll was insane. So I'm going to be turning that down. And then the elevator was a little less than I'd wanted. So I'm going to bump up the elevator and reduce the aileron roll quite a bit. Okay. Here back at the bench after that flight. That was my second flight. Ailerons are still pretty snappy. I am still just kind of surprised at the lack of oomph, I will say, and flight time. This is my first 8S jet, so I don't really have any idea of what I was expecting, but I guess hearing people talk and seeing the praises of the 8S jets, I guess I was expecting more just to be honest. It's not bad, but it's flying just about the same, if not just a little better than what I would have considered a typical 6S jet to fly like. I know this is a big heavy model with a lot of scale details and I owned the V1 of these. So it's not like I'm talking without experience on the old models. But even my old V1, it didn't fly as good as this. Okay. I'll say that, but the difference is not as much as I expected it to be. That's all I'm saying. I thought it would be more of a difference. I love to fly my models with ordinance all over it. I'm kind of worried how this one's going to do with all that hanging off of it. Because right now, I'm only getting three and a half, maybe four minutes of moderate flying. You know, what you saw me doing, just kind of doing circuits, a couple loops, a couple rolls, nothing crazy. That's three and a half minutes to storage voltage, maybe four, four and a half if you're willing to push your batteries. I typically don't. Right now I've got a rat's nest of connectors in here because it's what I have. I am going to be buying new series connectors so I can minimize this a little more. The CG is about what a lot of people say is about right on the CG, if not a little, a couple millimeters behind the CG marks on the bottom of the wing right here where my finger is. It flies okay there. It definitely, and I know people have already said this, if I could push these back about one more inch, I think that would be ideal. But with the blue box here, my receiver here, and all the cables, it makes it really hard. And I can't turn the batteries around because look at how flat that is. There's like no clearance underneath the cockpit area for the battery connectors. They're all back in the tail or the aft portion of the hatch. So this whole jumble needs to be right back here, which is not great. I wish it wasn't like that, but I'll work on it. See if I can come up with a better solution. I will say that I got my receiver right here and one of the antennas comes across here and goes vertical right here. The other is pointing straight back. I do have this here and with that, I'm getting about 20 to 25 frames losses on a flight, which is okay. I consider that acceptable. If I didn't have this, I think it would be horrible. I think I'd be having really bad connection issues. And then yeah, let's check this. So voltage is 3.83, 3.84, 3.87 per cell on my 6S. So I could have flown it a little longer. We have 12 seconds left on the timer. It was a 3.30. So that was about a three minute flight plus maybe a little bit of taxiing out and coming back. So if it was a three minute flight, you get storage voltage. You could probably go to four minutes if you really want to. Again, I don't like to go that low on my batteries. If I go below 3.78, I get a little nervous and that's not a bad thing for these batteries. I just, I like to try and keep them above 3.75 when they're done, if I can. So there you go. That's my bench talk on this thing post-flight. If I think of anything else, I'll narrate it in the video so you guys can hear about it.