Prototype

Two Rhinos Ready to Travel The Rhinos turned out to be easy to disassemble and reassemble.

I finished the prototype in November (2016) and it was soon in the air (refer to’SF1 Rhino Prototype Takes to the Air’). It was then that my wife came up with a great idea, “Why don’t you build one for Athol (my brother) for Xmas?”. Fortunately, the build time for the Rhino is not excessive and a second one was ready before our departure.

Both aircraft received bigger motors as I felt that the prototype was a little under powered and I increased the depth of the second fuselage to better fit the battery and speed controller.The time came to travel and both aircraft arrived in Darwin unscathed. I was excited to watch Athol unwrap his present though the whole project was a bit of a risk. The prototype had only one flight and with different running gear. I had to trust my instincts. As it turned out, my instincts were on the money as both aircraft survived 2 weeks of punishing flight testing only being grounded for a short while through a shortage of props.

Taking a Hard Hit I sent the prototype into the ground at high speed. It was the sort of impact where you expect to see a plane turned back into a kit. But not the Rhino. A quick trip to the hardware for some aluminium and she was flying the next day.

We were rough on them; flying out of a gravel pit during the wet season has its downfalls. In my hands, the prototype suffered two nasty hits, one nose in stall from 20 feet that would have destroyed a lesser aircraft and numerous bad landing. It's interesting to note that the name for a group of Rhino's (the animals) is a 'Crash'.

One of the unique features of the Rhino is the ability to adjust the dihedral from 0 to 10 degrees. We flew both aircraft with full dihedral and Athol flew his with zero degrees. He declared that he much preferred the zero configuration, that is what he is used to and he felt it, ‘just handled better in general.’ We will do some more testing to compare the configurations.

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