Rocket powered Spitfire

(This story comes from the RC Airplane World forum...)

So, we have all been there, walking towards the broken wreckage of your plane thinking "Why did I insert stupid manoeuvre here", but as I hinted at in a previous thread, I have had quite a hilarious incident involving a foamy Spitfire and a rocket, which by sharing with you I hope to get a few of your funny/embarrassing stories so we can bask in their collective stupidity/pain.

So, what happens when you try to launch a rocket from a poorly designed launch mechanism under a plane? Well...

This all started in a pub (where else?) when a mate asked if I would be able to launch one of my model rockets from under one of my planes. "Sure" I said, 7 pints down by this point, and I would probably have told him that I could launch the Saturn V from under there if he could get me one.
The next day, sobered up, I started thinking about how to easily achieve this feat that I had promised. Launching a rocket remotely would be easy - just a bit of kit from a cheap RC car from Argos; connect the igniter to the motor wires, power up the motor on the car controller, it sends current to the 'motor', or now the igniter, thus launching the rocket!
But I needed a way to secure the rocket under the plane. I decided against using one of my planes and instead opted for a cheap Chinese import foam Spitfire from eBay, as I was only doing this to prove a point and I wasn't going to spend an awful lot of money - and I kind of hoped to get the Spitfire through it....

I figured a way to get a rocket to be suspended under the plane, then released when it was fired; by looping a length of thread from the nose cone, through 2 eyelets under the fuse., over the motor, then attach it to a fin. When the motor ignited it would burn the thread, thus releasing the rocket. Easy as that! Well, erm....

So flight day arrives, and I'm feeling rather confident about all this. My mate turns up, he will be actually launching the rocket, as he will be holding the other remote (such was the cheapness of the Argos car, it had a complete RC system, you know the type). On my command he would launch it, thus making my minutes of work worth while. So, I have the plane in the air, she's flying OK but not brilliant because the rocket does effect the CG a considerable bit. But all I have to do is get one level flypast and my mate can launch the puppy...

As I make the low level bombing run, I give the firing signal to my mate who gleefully obliges, igniting the rocket. By now, you may have guessed, that things did not go well from this point on.
As the rocket ignited it pitched up, I can only assume because the rocket wasn't stable enough, and buried itself in the nose of the Spitfire, just behind the motor, which provided a useful place for it to push against.
So now I have a plane that was travelling reasonably slowly, but has now accelerated to about 90MPH. It turns out that the low quality foam that the Chinese use for wings does not appreciate the vertical acceleration, and obliges by jettisoning the entire left wing. Ace.

By this point my mate is in hysterics, and I am frantically moving any available control surface to prolong the expected. By this point the plane had been reduced to flying with no wings and proceeded to slam into the ground in a smouldering mess.
Unfortunately neither Chris nor I had our cameras on us, I naturally assumed that the brilliance of my design would allow for many more flights to photograph it in action.

So there you have it, sorry it took such a long time, but I thought I'd start us off - we all have sill crash stories, maybe none so darn stupid, but none the less, entertaining. So please share.

Back to top of page