Cessna Skyhawk (oz8064)

About this Plan

Cessna Skyhawk. Semi-scale sport design for single channel or full-house proportional.

Quote: "The Cessna Skyhawk featured here began its life over five years ago, in the form of a 1/2-A semi-scale single channel Cessna Skylane (oz6262) that I designed and built as a single channel sport trainer, to help me break into R/C, after hanging up my free-flight ships. After experimenting with a few small R/C designs then in vogue, without really being satisfied with them, I decided to design my own.

I wanted an easy-to-build ship, stable and tame in flight - one that would be 'goof-forgiving' so if you made errors you could rely on the inherent stability of the ship to get things back under control without making a jigsaw puzzle of the ship. It turned out to be mostly sheet balsa construction, with a flat-bottom wing featuring built-in washout at the tips, to safeguard against tip stalling in turns near the ground.

I believe I was successful, as every time I let Carl Goldberg fly the ship, I almost had to beg him to give the transmitter back to me. He liked it so much that it became the forerunner of his highly successful Cessna Skylane (oz868) kit. Carl took the basic design, began making a few changes here and there to give it more fidelity to scale, opened up the cabin to provide real windows, instead of the ones I painted on, and before we knew it the changes began to grow and grow, until it evolved into his present Skylane.

When I decided to go multi, my 1/2-A Skylane became the basis for my Sky Squire (oz10563) design, which started life with a flat bottom wing. Next I tried a semi-symmetrical section, then added ailerons, and it became the present design featured in the Midwest kit. I think that this was successful too, as every time I go over to the Midwest plant. Big Frank Garcher is out of Sky Squire kits!

About the time the Sky Squire was in its second season of existence, my son wanted to build a small multi - his first radio control project. He didn't want anything quite as big as the Sky Squire, so I decided to blow up the 1/2-A Skylane, put a semi-symmetrical wing on it, and stick 6-channel reeds in it, with a Max .15 for power. This flew just like the 1/2-A ship, but was a little faster. I took one of these to Kansas City a few years ago, while visiting the Lake Jacomo flying site of the KCRC Club. It was quite well received, and put in some fine flying - especially when Bud Atkinson was on the transmitter! He did things with that ship that I didn't know it would do.

Not long after, Cessna Aircraft broke with their introductory ad on the 1966 Cessna Skyhawk, in full color, in the aviation magazines. Here, flying out of the page at me was a beautiful all-white ship, trimmed in two-tone blue. I don't know if it was the inherent good looks of the Skyhawk, or its striking paint job that attracted me most, but I felt that I just had to build a model of it. After tinkering around with a few ideas, I trotted out the plans to the scaled up version of the 1/2-A Skylane and worked them over. I left all of the basic moments and aerodynamics of the design as they were, but altered the lines to make it look like the Skyhawk.

The end result is what you see here. When I displayed this design at the Toledo R/C conference last year, it received an excellent reception, along with its companion ship, the Aero Commander 100 (oz7705). I think the paint job had a lot to do with this, as I had finished it to look exactly like the one I saw in the Cessna ad.

The ship is an excellent flyer, and has all of the stability and forgiving characteristics of both the 1/2-A original Skylane, and the Sky Squire, with the addition of being a top-rate stunter..."

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