This Man Built A 29-Foot-Long, 800-Pound RC Airbus A380 And Its Level Of Detail Will Blow Your Mind

The radio-controlled airplane is one of the most accessible ways to get into aviation. It’s deeply satisfying to build your own scale aircraft and fly it. Most RC planes are relatively small, but there’s no limit to where your imagination or skill can take you. A perfect example is this, the world’s largest RC version of the world’s largest passenger airliner, the Airbus A380. This RC plane was built by YouTuber Ramy RC, and the 29-foot-long, 800-pound beast of an RC plane gets better the longer you look at it. This thing is longer than some real planes!

A couple of months ago, I came across a handful of videos showing some ultra-large RC airliners. There’s just something so impressive about taking the design of something like a Boeing 747 or an Airbus A380, scaling it down, and still making it work. These scale planes also seemed so realistic, too.

Right when I thought I was going to write about these mammoth-scale creations, I found the teeny tiny disclaimers that they were made by AI, and calling that disappointing would be a massive understatement. Even worse, search engine AIs believe the AI-slop RC planes are legitimate. Thankfully, there is a real world of large-scale model planes out there, and some of them are even powered by real pint-size jet engines!

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an RC plane that reeled me in, hook, line, and sinker. YouTuber Ramy RC (above) says he’s built the world’s largest RV Airbus A380, and I see no other RC plane that can even come close. But the size of the plane is only the start of it. The level of detail here is mind-blowing. AI has ruined things so much that I thought this RC plane was just more garbage, but this is the real deal.

Dreaming Big

The host of the channel, Ramy, has one of those heartwarming life stories. He was born and raised in Syria, where he fell in love with all things aviation. Ramy would learn aircraft design, move to Germany, and hone his art before coming to America. Ramy is especially known for his knowledge of composites, which allows him to craft increasingly large RC planes. He’s also known for collaborating with filmmaker and RC plane fanatic Tyler Perry, who flies Ramy’s impressive builds from his runway.

For this latest Airbus A380 build, Ramy says he started with the Airbus A380-800 that he built a few years ago. That one had a wingspan of 13 feet and was pretty famous in its own right. Ramy’s planes were already big, but in recent times, he’s been challenging himself to make them even bigger and more complex.

One of Ramy’s recent builds is a 1/7 scale Boeing 777-9. This RC airliner has a wingspan of 33 feet and a weight of 630 pounds. Just gaze at the beauty of the machine.

In his build video about the Airbus A380, Ramy stated that he wanted to bring his A380-800 to the same scale as the Boeing. That meant going back to the workshop, scaling up the old A380 RC plane, and getting to work.

Building Up

(Click here if you don’t see the video.)

Ramy explains that, to build the new A380, he started with EPS foam for the fuselage. This foam, which was broken up into four sections due to its large size, was cut by a CNC machine. Then, he covered the foam with fiberglass for the fuselage’s outside skin and carbon fiber for reinforcement on the inside. The stabilizers are wrapped in carbon fiber on the outside as they’ll need to handle heavy aerodynamic loads and need the extra strength.

Assembling the fuselage involved gluing the foam sections together, cutting out the interior support structures, and laying down both the fiberglass and the carbon fiber. The support structures ensured the foam kept its shape while being formed, but when the fuselage was put together, it largely supported itself.

The thing that gets me here is that the fuselage is so thick that Ramy fits inside of it with room to spare.

Things got crazy pretty quickly. Ramy wanted this plane to be realistic, and that meant going the extra mile. He cut out over 200 holes for the plane’s windows and had an MLSA 3D printer punch out resin window frames for the whole fuselage. Acrylic was later used to fill in the frames for accurate-looking windows.

In the next video (click here if you can’t see it below), Ramy covered building the wings, and there was a lot of work that went into them. Ramy said that the wing box and wing spars, which are the load-carrying structures of the wings, are attached to the fuselage through thick 50mm tubes, brackets, and braces of solid carbon with wooden structures for additional support. Creating the carbon structures inside the foam parts of one wing took an entire day.

Then another day was spent sanding it down, tracing cutouts for the slats, spoilers, and flaps, then laying down the carbon wrap. Ramy said that he and his team laid down three layers of carbon on the outside of the wing until the engines, then two layers after. Apparently, the giant Airbus RC required an extra layer compared to the Boeing due to the loads and surface area that the Airbus will face.

The landing gear is another work of art. Ramy says that the landing gear is made out of aluminum, and making it took three months of design and fabrication from a collaborator in Germany. Ramy then says that even the plane’s wheels and tires are all custom.

The impressive level of detail includes the moving parts of the wings. Ramy says there are two motors on each wing, spoilers, flaps, but no slats. Each spoiler and flap is individual, like they are on the real plane, and uses 3D-printed hinges.

The control surfaces and the landing gear move using an armada of servos. A set of 88 kg torque servos handles lighter tasks while 130 kg servos work the control surfaces on the wings. Huge 190 kg servos work the rudder and elevator.

Ramy also talked about adding mock thrust reversers. He explained that an actual thrust reverser would be complicated, time-consuming, and not really practical since the scale plane has great brakes. But since Ramy strives for realism, the model plane has reversers on the inner engines that pull back on landing, just like a real A380.

To build these, Ramy says, he cut the nacelles of the inner engines in half, mounted 3D printed rings on them, and then had them run on a linear bearing. A servo handles the opening and closing function.

In the third video (click here if you don’t see it above), we see that the windows were cut out and the fuselage primed for paint. Even more exciting is the quartet of VasyFan VF-250 electric ducted fan jets (EDF) mounted into their pylons and wearing beautiful carbon nacelles.

Four of these EDFs (below) are good for a total of 450 pounds of thrust.

The landing gear doors were another fascinating part of the project. Ramy couldn’t make the doors the same way he made the fuselage because the doors need to be thin for both realism and space reasons. The landing gear doors were made out of gelcoat, carbon, and a honeycomb layer vacuumed together. Sadly, due to space restrictions and complexity reasons, Ramy could not fully replicate the operation of the A380’s landing gear. On the real plane, the landing gear doors close after the gear comes down, but there was only enough space on the scale version to get the outside doors to close with the gear down.

Once the structure was complete, moving, and connected to their servos, Ramy had to make it all work. This meant running the wiring to power and run 39 servos, 12 brakes, and five landing gear actuators. Then there’s a whole main board where everything meets up. A Jeti DC24 controller operates the plane:

Ramy says that there were so many individual bits and pieces that had fine control that 24 channels from one board were not nearly enough to control the plane. The landing gear sequence had to be programmed, and all of the parts tested, too.

A set of eight Tattu 22.8V 23000mAh LiPo batteries (above) powers the whole thing. Of course, Tyler Perry got to fly the Airbus on its first flight.

A Work Of Scale Art

The finishing touch was giving the RC plane a Lufthansa 100th Anniversary livery, which took a team a month and a half to do. Ramy said that this jet was his team’s best work yet in terms of size, difficulty, and the paint job. The result is mind-boggling. If it weren’t for having cars and people for scale, I would have thought that this was a real Airbus A380-800. It even seems to fly like the real deal.

Ramy says that the final plane is 29 feet long, has a wingspan of 32 feet, is 10 feet tall at the tip of the vertical stabilizer, and weighs 800 pounds. For comparison, a Cessna 150 is 23 feet long and has a wingspan of 33 feet. Even a Cessna 172 is only 27 feet long with a 36-foot wingspan. This RC plane is bigger than a common trainer plane! The Airbus RC is so big that it has to sleep in a hangar.

I also love how Ramy presents his videos. His videos aren’t an hour long, and he doesn’t waste viewers’ time messing around and doing nothing. Instead, you get to watch the RC planes get built piece by piece with only a few interruptions here and there for Ramy to explain what he’s doing. It’s basically RC plane ASMR. I barely scratched the surface of Ramy’s art, and I highly recommend giving these videos a watch to learn more.

There is a lot of AI slop out there in the world, and it’s a shame because you don’t have to look at the result of a writing prompt and a cold computer. There are real people out there doing awesome things, and Ramy is one of them. He built a giant RC plane that looks fake, but is not only real, but was built with some incredible engineering. I feel like I have to visit a model aviation club now, because the world of RC planes is far more exciting than I expected. For now, I’m just going to watch more of these videos.