Can You Pilot A RC Plane With A Flight Controller?

Yes, there are a variety of ways to do it! The control split is:

1. Visuals
2. Controls

For visuals (optional, but nice to tweak the control parameters in the field!), two good routes via cameras are:

1. Screens (ex. tablet or iPhone)
2. VR/AR headsets

For controls, you need to replace or control the transmitter in order to control (or replace) the vehicle’s receiver, which in turn controls the motor & the servos. There are a variety of ways to do this! You can get an Arduino Nano clone for under ten bucks on Amazon:

You can use a gamepad:

Or a HOTAS setup:

You can also do the reverse, i.e. use an R/C transmitter to control flight sim games on your computer!

Be sure to check out Dronecode!

Fun fact: Before being discovered, Marilyn Monroe worked in a drone factory!

Drones have actually been used since before WWI! There was an English WWI pilot named Reginald Denny who had an R/C airplane hobby. He came to America, started a drone company, and sold them to the military to use as target practice. Eventually they made over 15,000 drones for various military purposes in WWII! Denny became an actor & encouraged Ronald Reagan, who at the time was the captain of the Army’s PR Hollywood division, to send over photographer David Conover to take pictures for Yank (Army Weekly military magazine) as a way to boost morale. It was there that he discovered Norma Jeane Mortenson, who later became Marilyn Monroe, whose movies went on to gross a today-equivalent $2 billion dollars! Here she is posing with the Radioplane OQ-2, which was the first mass-produced UAV in America:

She ended up making out okay with the whole airplane thing, haha!

Dang, we need a new Air Hogs thread!