The Team Legit Fohdy (FOH-dee) is a 40 inch flying wing designed for beginners and people who just want to cruise around in the air. The description on the Team Legit website calls it a “Smooth and stable FPV platform… (with) a number of tweaks which make it even easier to handle for the beginner…while retaining most of the extreme speed and maneuverability that has made our 32″ customers so happy.”
Team Legit is based out of Southern California and was founded by Johnny Meguerditchian. They’ve got some great race wings on their site, but Johnny wanted something more tame to ease newbies (like me) into the hobby. After working with all size wings from 36″ up to 60″, they settled on a 40″ wing for easy transporting. With a tame airfoil and a slight dihedral to the wings, Team Legit have created something with the Fohdy that isn’t a racer, but isn’t a simple trainer either.
The Fohdy comes as a kit which includes the two wing halves in their respective wing beds, fiberglass wing spars, Balsa elevons, control rods and horns, an aluminum motor mount, laminate, and corrugated plastic winglets, nose skids, electronic bay hatch, and camera mount (plus some cool swag!). To complete the build you will need to supply an ESC, motor, prop, servos, and a LiPo battery. Team legit has a list of recommended electronics on their site and even sells a power combo and batteries ready to go. As for tools you will need a laminating iron, razor or large X-Acto knife, and a lot of Goop adhesive. A heat gun may also come in handy.
Compared to building the Flite Test planes the Fohdy should not be a problem. The methods are different, but it is still mostly cutting and gluing. If you’ve never laminated a build before it takes some practice, but if I can do it anyone can. Team legit provides build videos for all of their planes, though at the time of writing the Fohdy video had not yet been completed. Luckily the customer support Team Legit provides is top notch, and they were quite helpful in assisting me complete my build.
I scored a good deal on an Eagle Tree Vector on RC Groups, so I opted to install it on the Fohdy. With a 40″ wing span there was plenty of room to lay out the video transmitter, RC receiver, and GPS modules apart from each other to minimize interference. I’ll cover the Vector in a later review.
The time had finally come to get this wing in the air, so after charging up the batteries I took it out to the proving grounds. I get nervous about hand-launching wings, but I quickly realized that with the proper center of gravity I had nothing to worry about. The Fohdy did most of the work for me. Give it a good toss and it glides out of your hand and up into the air like it had always been there. I don’t think I’ve ever had a maiden go as smoothly before, and it only helped to make me even more excited to put on the FPV goggles and go cruising.
Flying Line-Of-Sight is a nice experience, but the Fohdy really shines in FPV. It’s incredibly stable so you have plenty of time to take in the view vs. making constant corrections to attitude. It’s definitely a difference experience than flying multirotors, and one I can see myself doing more often. After a few minutes in the sky I realized I hadn’t even bothered to turn on the Vector’s flight stabilization. That’s how well the Fohdy flies! I attempted a roll and a loop, and while they completed they were slow and not very exciting. To be honest that was asking a lot of what is intended as a cruising plane, but know that it is still possible to pull them off if you like. If you try to loop too hard too fast you may stall, but the Fohdy is very forgiving and you can get it back into control in no time. I tried several times to get it to tip stall or spiral and didn’t have any success.
In fact the only issue I had all day happened to be the Vector…
See, I don’t think I had it configured correctly and at one point I lost RC link. Normally this would have thrown the Vector into RTH mode and the plane would have come back to me… instead it turned too hard and spiraled into the cliff-side forest… Heck, even I couldn’t get it to to that.
I was certain the Fohdy was either lost or severely damaged, but after 15 minutes of climbing through briars and thorns across a rather steep cliff I was able to locate the Fohdy in a lovely little clearing. It found the one spot between two trees where the leaves slowed it down and dropped it directly under a beam of sunlight. No joke, it looked like a Disney cartoon.
So how did it look? Perfect. Besides some dirt there was no damage to the Fohdy at all, and the camera mount protected both my FPV camera as well as my GoPro. I tossed it back in the car (that was enough excitement for one day) and left for home.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am with the Fohdy. The building experience was challenging but fun, and the support from Team Legit was more than fantastic. Being able to launch the plane on the first try was something I never expected to be able to do. It isn’t the fastest or most aerobatic wing, but then it isn’t intended to be. The EPP wing is tough and the aluminum motor mount is both adjustable and strong.
If you’re looking to get into fixed-wing FPV, or to move up from DTFB builds, Team Legit’s Fohdy is a perfect “next step”. The price won’t break the bank and what you get for your money is a solid, stable FPV platform that is perfect for the beginner as well as an excellent choice for someone who just wants to cruise around the sky taking in the view.
Noob approved!
For more reviews, check out NoobRC.com!
Full disclosure: Team-Legit provided the Fohdy kit for the purposes of this review. I built the plane myself after purchasing the recommended electronics. I do not work for Team Legit, and this review was formed from my own experiences and opinions.
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