Kunai

by FliteTest | September 8, 2014 | (15) Posted in Reviews

Today we take a look at the Kunai by Great Planes. This warm-liner come ARF (almost ready-to-fly) or Rx-R (receiver-ready).

In addition:

Requires: 4-5 channel radio w/micro receiver, 11.1V 1200mAh LiPo battery & charger
ARF Also Requires: 20A brushless ESC & 4 high-torque micro servos

As far a battery setup, Great Planes recommends anywhere between a 850mAh up to 1300mAh. In a perfect world, a 1200mAh fits the best inside the fuselage. 

We were able to fly for about 8 minutes on a 1300mAh 3S.

You can get anywhere from 7 - 10 minutes depending on how aggressive you fly or if you can catch a thermal you can fly for much longer. 

If you are used to scratch building or EPP planes, this will be a more intensive build, but well worth the effort. Keep in mind, this thing will be traveling at an excessive speed so any little detail missed will be amplified by the flight characteristics. Do you best to align everything perfectly and don't get cheap glue! We highly recommend epoxy. No hot glue!  

The only real modification we made was to the hatch. It secures with two little magnets, one on the hatch and one on the fuselage. To be honest, we didn't trust them. At the speed this thing travels we felt the magnets weren't strong enough to hold the hatch on. 

We simply added two pieces of tape around the hatch as a little bit of insurance. 

This may seem like an extremely intimidating plane, but to our surpise, it was less hectic than expected. 

The stall tendencies were very forgiving. No hard tip stalls. 

Light wing loading allows for awesome maneuverability as well as the drag free airframe. 

This is as close as you can get with the follow quad before this happens...

If you want all the detals for this awesome plane, check out the Official Product Page which includes a PDF of the manual and some cool desktop wallpaper!

 

Thanks to Audible for sponsoring this episode! If you want to see if audiobooks are your thing, visit audible.com/flitetest and you can download one for FREE!

But a more important thanks goes to you! Thank you for being the best R/C community out there. We wouldn't get to do any of this without you. 

COMMENTS

PropSpinner on September 8, 2014
Nice review. Great shots.
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Yogenh on September 8, 2014
I like it but I can't find out how much it is
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Coman on April 2, 2015
I think it is around $200 and around 135 pounds if your in the UK.
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Yogenh on April 3, 2015
Thanks
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510thousandths on September 8, 2014
$130 arf, $200 rx-r...
http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0095p?FVPROFIL=&FVSEARCH=kunai
Tower hobbies is out of stock, but a google search would likely find you one for the same prices.
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luis machado on December 20, 2014
Wyhat is the diference between them?
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Talon66 on December 27, 2014
"RxR" means Receiver Ready. It includes the Receiver on the $199.00 package, where the $129.00 version does not.
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AkimboGlueGuns on September 8, 2014
That quad strike looks like it really hurt!
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Flying Cirkus on September 8, 2014
Nice looking warmliner!!

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Ano Pilot on September 9, 2014
Thanks, great review, and some really interesting educational material to digest. I will be re-watching this a few times.
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Ano Pilot on September 9, 2014
Plus, This caused me to watch the Bird of Time show, which mentioned (even referring to the Radian) the need for a Throttle/Elevator Mix to avoid extreme and potentially unsustainable climb angles. The flipping Eagles knocked you (Josh B) of topic though. Could we perhaps have the matter properly and exhaustively addressed??? Currently I really dislike the way my Radian flies, wallowing about all over the place and tending to go 45˚ at anything above 33% throttle, horrible. I plan to push the CG forward but the Mix idea interests me too.
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Cytogreg on October 6, 2014
Hey there, I have a Radian too but I overhauled it with the Paul Naton (radiocarbonart.com) mods and it flies like a dream. I have had some 30+ minute flights between motor runs and since I use a simple four channel radio I don't have any mixing options. Sometimes I will give it some slight down elevator during a highspeed climb, but nothing scarry. I have a Bird of Time also and am in the process of electrifying it. Cheers
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tigert10 on September 8, 2014
With Peter holding the boom mic, and Alex on camera...who is flying the multirotor camera for the aerial shots? Gotta give some credit where credit is due...they had some pretty nice shots.
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Stubby01 on May 15, 2017
Darn it, keep up the good work, now I want this one!!!
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Kunai