Now's Your Best Time to Grab a Foam Plane

Because of inexpensive foam planes, we live in very exciting times in the RC model airplane world!

In the last 4 years, very viable foam planes have made a huge splash in the ARF and quick build arenas. It is possible to get very high quality ARF's and quick build kits for very little money.

The rapid development and proliferation of these electric foam jets and such offers the RC flyer some distinct advantages. Foam is less expensive than the traditional materials, and is often molded into complex and accurate shapes to model full scale aircraft.

Some foams are pretty fragile, but serve the purpose of having accurate model foam planes with a fair amount of detail built into the surface. They are lightweight, and fly very well for a low price.

Model jets have become readily available in foam materials, and offer a choice of foam types, and various propulsion systems.

First, the foam types fall into EPS, Depron, and variations of EPP.

EPS, or expanded polystyrene, is a bead foam that is molded into fairly smooth surfaces. It is light weight and can be painted with water based paints, but it is quite fragile for foam planes.

Depron is a smooth sheet material with good skin strength and smoother finish than beaded foams. Lately it has been heat formed into complex models that are rigid and have a smooth finish, as well as low weight. They too are quite fragile, but capable of very high performance.

The EPP variants come in two main varieties, open cell sheet models, and closed cell molded shapes. The molded variety of EPP like foam planes are fairly smooth, and usually white in color. They offer the advantages of fairly light weight, excellent impact resistance, and an accurate scale shape.

These Budget RC foam jets will take a fairly rough landing in stride with little more than some minor dents. Their main drawbacks are a higher cost, and some extra work to get paint to stick to the surface.

EPP foam planes jets are a very recent development, because some difficult design problems had to be overcome. First, EPP sheet is very flexible open celled foam. The flexibility gives the model wonderful impact resistance, but also begins to twist at higher speeds, and what is a jet all about anyway, but speed?

Some major progress was made in sheet Depron foam jets a couple of years ago, with the addition of carbon leading edges, spars, and fuselage stiffeners. Just recently, high speed EPP sheet jets were introduced by Budget RC.

Careful placement of carbon strips throughout the model, and an unusual painting technique have stiffened the EPP without lowering its impact resistance. The cost is quite low to get into a very durable profile jet. With a high power propulsion system, these jets move at startling speeds!

So, you can't lose in the world of foam jets. You can have very detailed scale models, or durable high performance machines. Make your screaming, low altitude pass with any of them, it's all good!

About the author

Tom Pepper has been flying planes since about age eight, when he could find five cents for balsa gliders at the local toy store. He got totally geeked about radio control planes when he saw one fly at a Boy Scout Jamboree at age 13.

It took until he was 30 years old to have the means and time to build an RC glider (Olympic II) which he learned to fly on. Glow planes followed, and in the last five years he began flying electric foam planes. Tom has been RC flying for 28 years now.

He belongs to the Hudson RC Flyers in Hudson, MI, and has been there for 27 years. His favorite plane to fly plane is always the one he pulls out of the rafters and fires up for the first time of the flying season.

Tom really enjoys electric jets, but lightweight 3D models always offer a thrill a minute too! He has combined his photography hobby with model RC planes and does aerial photography as a part time business.

Currently, Tom has four land based planes, one water based plane, and a Quad copter that hoists a camera as well. Using video downlink, he can see what the camera is looking at and fire the shots remotely.

Tom lives in Jackson, MI with his wife, Anita.