I should have been going easy on this plane, but you know how it goes when you start to feel comfortable with a larger 49 inch. Wingspan plane. You have a good time and it brings me back to my line of sight flying fun, so it does have a nice receiver, hatch for all kinds of stuff you want to put in there. I have a large motor on here, 28 20 motor with a 50 amp esc. You can fly it on 4s, as well with my setup and if you want to fly it as an aerobatic trainer, this would be a great second plane. It will also kind of double as a first plane if you want to do that, and if you want to put a gopro or an insta360 on there, it'll handle any type of camera on there or fpv let's go ahead and get it up in the air. For the flight test, i was going easy on it for the first, maybe five minutes, and then i went straight into doing my figure. Eights inverted eights are so much fun. It is a good way to practice being inverted and flying rudder um. If you're going to do this, i kind of recommend doing it a little bit higher, because this is how i ended up kind of slam dunking. It you'll see the crash at the end of this review, but the nice thing about balsa and monaco is that, even though it looks a little intimidating when you do crash a balsa airplane, it is fixable.
I mean you know you, take it home, put it on the bench. You look at it two weeks later, and sometimes it just. It looks a little easier to fix after you. You look at the parts for a few weeks, so at first it can be kind of intimidating. Like wow, i have a big pile of balsa here, but if you go to your local hobby shop, you can get a little bit of plywood rebuild the front end on it. The nice thing about this one is that durability rating on it is pretty high for a monocot balsa plane, because i pretty much drove it straight in a little bit of an angle, but it didn't destroy the firewall in the front. Didn'T push the motor back through the firewall, so fuselage is quite quite durable. The wing did snap in half, but the carbon tube was the part that broke so pretty much. All i have to do is put the wings back on it and i'm good, but um flying it right away. I didn't have to do any trim on this plane either you can go back and watch my big horn review if you're looking for a kind of a tundra sort of uh tundra, x style plane like from e flight. That plane is very similar. Big tires, this one has much smaller tires, but it still did take off out of the grass, which is good news and tracks really well.
It'Ll knife edge it'll fly upside down. It'Ll do corkscrews. I even think this place that's vertical, probably flat spin. So here, i'm, just kind of going up for a big diving fork screw down at the ground and pull out at the last. Second, you get more points you can go lower by the way guys. I don't know how brave you are with your planes, but nice there's, a low, inverted pass and i'm getting really comfortable with the plane. I felt like this was really uh would have been a good plane to add either electric or a gas motor on. I think, if you put maybe around say, like a 40 size gas motor on there well or nitro motor gas or nitro, either way these days, you can get smaller gas motors these days and they'll fly for like a really long time. Nitro will probably get you a 20 minute flight time on this particular plane, but i was getting like 8 to 10 minute flights on the 3s 2200 battery. If you want to go my electric route, i'll put all of the electronics that you need down below in the links you guys can gather and build this kit. If you want to the cool thing, is that it does come with monaco pre covered on the plane. I got ta say these guys did a fantastic job on the monaco and i was really impressed with the big horn as well from omg hobby.
So i think they've kind of released some bangers this year, the m2 helicopter it's very awesome and the m1 they're releasing soon which i'm going to review on the channel that's the smaller version. But man isn't that cool with the 360 view on there and the sort of uh t stall, we did there into a Music corkscrew down at the ground, really fun. So i was having fun doing hammerheads t stalls, uh, corkscrews, inverted eights and all kinds of fun stuff. It really kind of made me interested to fly omps. I believe they have an edge 540 as well coming out in a binding fly i'm going to try to get a hold of that or the kit either way, i'll build it up. If you get the kit version, this will probably take you a couple hours to build, and i i i did mine kind of quick if, if it, if you really take your time on this kit, it might take you five hours if you're really taking your time. Just an afternoon pretty much you can be flying this plane, it's, really not hard to put the servos in and run the wires. You might need to order some extra wire harness wires and servo leads, and things like that i'll try to put links down below for lots of wire, but again the landing gear is just a little bit small making me kind of nose over, but the cool thing Is i didn't break the prop and, i have to say, it's a very impressive plane to fly, and i i was really happy to fly it's kind of like one of those planes you just want to keep putting batteries in and sending it back up in the Air it's, just so smooth the nicest thing about it, too, is that if you had a nitro motor on here and you had a dead stick, this is the kind of plane that will actually come back down and be able to glide back in for a landing Here, i'm, just playing around with that inverted again.
Some planes have this weird characteristic where, when you go inverted it kind of pushes itself over back around a lot of the pusher style planes do that. But i love the construction on the plane. I think that the 49 inch wingspan is good. I think it could probably handle some bigger wheels for the landing gear and the landing gear has three bolts on the bottom, so it's quite durable. But in my crash they completely came off the plane when the wings broke in half and separated as well. But the fuselage held up so i'd say it's, it's, quite durable, but a very attractive plane to see out of the field. I love the color combo here. The blue and yellow super easy to see. The magnets are really good as well. Both the front hatch and the back hatch for my 3s 2200. I also flew this on 4s. So if you guys want to fly it on 4s i'll put that 50 amp esc down below and it'll handle 4s on 50 amp with that 12 and a half inch prob no problem, and this was actually the second day i went back out to fly the Challenger for you guys, because i just wanted to get some more video with this plane and and do some more aerobatics for you and what's funny is. I went out and i was getting all excited. I'Ve got my 360 1r recording, and here we go for the takeoff getting super stoked and i was just going to try to get a little more video for you guys – and this is the part of my video, where i ended up putting it in and crashing It um, unfortunately like it, must have been like the first like two minutes of this flying videos, just playing around doing a little bit of hovering there and seeing if it would hover, it seemed like it needed a little more oomph in the motor for hovering.
But if you're going to try to hover it do it on 4s and then i was coming back around and i decided to go inverted. I was going to do. Some inverted passes again because you can get this plane quite low. Did a big loop there. I did some outside loops and right here i went inverted came back around yeah bam came in almost saved, it almost got it level with the ground, but not quite so. My plane is gon na. Take some repair. Um – and all i have to do is go to my hobby shop, get another carbon tube for the wing and put the two pieces of wing back together, but that's the chance you take with balsa and monaco guys. I hope you enjoyed this review, guys.
