Anime plane recreation "Santa Cruz"

 Hello everyone

A while ago I saw the movie "the princess and the pilot". I really liked the movie because the major part of it takes place in the skies with really intence dogfighting scenes and very nice planes. The story is about two kingdoms which are at war with a third kingdom. The prince from one kingdom falls in love with the princess of the other kingdom and they decide to get maried. To do so the princess of course has to be moved to the kingdom of the prince, but to get to her prince she has to travel trough the hostile territory. The only way to do so is to fly, here is where the pilot comes in. He is ordered to fly the princess to her prince. Long story short, he gets a plane, loads up the princess and sets off. The plane is nicknamed "Santa Cruz" and is a gorgeous bird, besides from that it is the fastest plane the kingdom has available. Being such a beautiful and awesome bird (a little link here, hope you guys like Sabaton) I wanted to recreate it to fly myself.

I have started working on it about two years ago, wanting to make it an unique piece I decided to make it a hot wire cut flying piece of awesomeness. Being not a really well known movie I couldn't exactly find building plans and I couldn't figure out which plane it was based on (Some say the fuselage is based on the SBD Dauntless but as far as I'm concerned the dauntless looks more chunky) . I since then got more research done and came to a conclusion, it is a mashup of a couple of planes, The fuselage shares the same bulkyness as most Grumman or Vought designs without making it look fat if you understand what I mean. The wings show some similarities with a Hawker Tempest and the tailsection is almost an exact copy of a ercoupe.

 That set aside I shall proceed with my story. Ever since the Flite test crew mentioned they were making plans for a FT-Shinden my build has gotten a higher priority. Why? let me tell you: in the movie the Shinden is actually used as a combat plane. It's speed and agility makes it the most feared plane in the entire movie, the only problem is that the people who are flying the Shinden are the bad guys.

I thought it would be pretty neat to have a plane to go alongside the Shinden. I would love to dogfight along with my flybuddies which are probably going to build the Shinden but will never have a plane as cool as the Santa Cruz XD. With this in mind I searched some 3-view pictures online, took out my hotwire bow and started cutting.

 The plane I came up with looked amazing and flew amazing until I flew it into a tree. After that there apperared to be something out of alignment and the next flight went horrebly wrong. The plane hasn't flown since and hangs on my wall as an artpiece. 

I still wanted to do build the plane but I either didn't have the time or didn't have the right state of mind for building and when I finally did have all of these things at my disposal my parents decided to renovate the garage. Unfortunately this also meant that I had to give up my workingspace until the renovations were completed. But eventually everything fell into place and i could start working again.

This time I went with depron since I am more familiar with this material. I modified the plans of the FT-spitfire because this was about the size I wanted this plane to become. As soon as I got all the parts cut out I assembled them as fast as I could, testglided her and the CG was already spot on. So I fitted electronics and took her out for a testflight.

I wish I could have recorded my senses and emotions when she just gracefully took off from my hand and without any trimming nessesairy just embraced the skies. It had to be one of the most enjoyable moments out of my four years in this hobby. She didn't have any bad tendencies what so ever, stalls were basically only a light headnod as if she was saying "hey, you just got too far" . Thanks to the undercamber in the wingtips there were no tipstalls during the entire maiden flight and hands off she kept on going straight as an arrow. Landings were a breeze, just turn off the motor and let her glide down to the ground with a gentle flare to finish things off. 

She didn't appear to be very fast so I had to return to the drawing board yet again to alter the design to make her fly fast enough to make a shinden work for the kill. I ended up making the wing a little thinner and decreasing the undercamber on the wingtips. Decreasing the size of the vertical stabilizers should also helped increasing the overall speed of the plane. 

Finally happy with the design I gave the first prototype to my brother who had just crashed his stuka. He said it was the first time in a long time that he had flown a plane that flew so well. I took out the second prototype and we were able to fly formation for a while before our hands began to freeze off in the cold Belgian winter.

I noticed that my plane was a nice bit faster than his so I took that as a good sign. And so the second prototype became my new favorite plane to fly. I still wasn't happy though. She wasn't fast enough to my liking so I made the wings even thinner and started experimenting with painting.

After assembling her.The finished plane looks awesome

The plane became the third prototype because I continued making the plane faster by narrowing the fuse, making the wings thinner and dereasing the amount of undercamber in the wingtips.

The wing basically became more like a NN Speedwing than a FT wing, complete with aluminium spar and everything but still with a little bit of undercambered wingtips.

This plane was fitted with a 120A car esc and a LDPower 864W motor spinning a 9/6 prop. A 4s 2200mAh lipo made it the fastest plane I had ever flown.

It weren't only the looks and speed of this plane that made it into my favorite plane to fly, she had a typical sound when she passed by and it always made me feel better. 

I hoped that I would be able to fly this plane troughout the summmer but faith and I didn't have the same idea. On one of the flights I went for a high speed pass like I had done dozens of times. Only this time her typical swooooOOOOOooooosh went a little more like swoooKLABAM........slap. 

It turned out the wings had folded and she was heading to earth at about 80km/h. When hitting the ground she just exploded. Blue foam went everywhere, little pieces of my favorite plane taking their last flight.

 I think I cut the slots in the aluminium spar a little too deep and fatigue combined with high G's caused it to break.

After this I wanted to build a new one, but I still wasn't happy with the plane, she flew like a dream but she still looked a bit too much like a box. So I Googled the plane to see if there was a picture of the plane that I could use to make it look better. I made a surprising discovery. There actually was a 1/72 plastic model kit. So I bought it, more to have a nice model of my most favorite plane ever than to use it as a example. 

As expected it came with nice decals and most importantly, a paint sceme example

I continued to make more and more of these planes, most of them were just proofs of concept to test out new features I added to the plane and how they affected the flight characteristics ( making the wing even thinner, ideal cut in the aluminium spar, rounding off the fuselage, adding root fairings, trying to make the tail less flimsy, more realistic canopy...) and I think I have created the ideal plane now. 

 Free Plans and build log here, remember to print the .pdf files on scale 100%

 All of my experimentations cased me to have a nice lot of configurations to build the plane for different skill levels, both for builders and pilots.

You will find out that the plane is extremely stable no matter what variation you build. In fact, I have yet to get this plane to tipstall unless I pinnend the elevator back for several seconds at zero throttle. All I had to do was let go of the elevator and the plane immediately was back under full control and I could go crazy again.

The entire build takes about 6 hours, I know right, thats long. I am however a slow builder and this is also considering the time I needed to cut the plane out of the foam.

The following video is a Timelapse Build of the top of the line,130km/h going speed demon I have always dreamed to fly since I saw the movie. If you don't like build timelapses, there is a little maiden flight at the end of the video. The plane build here can only be describes as a Nerdic and FliteTest build mashup. With this plane leaning more towards the NN side of the spectrum, and the lower difficulty plane leaning more towards the FF side.

I will probably do a follow up article about added details to make the plane look more like the plane in the movie ( inlets, turbo,...) once I am happy with how she looks with all her make-up so to speak. Otherwise I will  just keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and this plans would stay reserved to me. I don't want that, the plane flies and looks awesome as is and I (finally) am happy enough with it to share it with the world. 

I hope some of you guys give this plane a try, it looks like a piece of art and flies even better.

thanks for reading and building, feel free to place a picture of your finished plane in the forum thread named "anime plane" in the FliteTest forum  ;)