Designing and Building Heavy Lifting Modification of a Radio Controlled Helicopter

The paper presents the heavy lifting modification of radio controlled T-Rex 700 DFC PRO helicopter which was originally designed as acrobatic machine. The purpose of designing machine like this is a need for a cheap and reliable machine specifically designed to carry weights for research and development purposes. Thanks to its design there is a possibility to attach to it a measuring apparatus, modules like auto-pilot, and weights. It can be also used to test wide range of rotors and other components which makes it very universal research tool. To achieve those goals the whole frame and landing gear has been redesigned using NX 11 CAD/CAM/CAE to achieve desired cargo space and weight distribution. Additionally the tail has been lengthened to allow use of the rotors with bigger diagonal. All the applied changes has been made to increase the machine payload. The designed elements were fabricated and the helicopter has been tested in flight. During the test flights several performance parameters were measured.