The Lightest Delta Wing - FMS Rafale 80mm

It's the one death Dorito that Freewing doesn't make, so let's see what it's truly capable of. Hey there, I'm Jon, this is Two Brothers RC, and this is the FMS Rafale 80mm. This is like the 5th video on this jet, and I promise today will be the last time it shows up on the channel, barring some seismic realignment like FMS deciding to make an updated version after the complaints I'm about to lodge with it. Let's get this out up front. Unlike the Freewing Doritos, the FMS Rafale is very lightweight, which makes it float around almost effortlessly. Unfortunately, it comes with a whole host of problems that still bother me. Let's dive into this review and find out what they are. No, this isn't a stock paint job, because I was sick of looking at the Spirit Airlines Tiger Meat scheme. It's done up now in the Razgriz scheme from Ace Combat 5, using decals from Kali Graphics. Starting with everyone's favorite section, agility, this is where the Rafale shines brightly in the sky. Other death Doritos do pretty well here too, but only the Rafale is truly special in the sense that the wing load is so absurdly low that it could almost be a backcountry bush jet if you put gigantic tires on it. The jet has no real bad tendencies in the air if you're flying it on a reasonable battery. The jet is easy to see and it's easy to maneuver. If you're still flying the stock Spirit Airlines Tiger Meat scheme, you should have no issues with visibility. People often ask me how I can see the Razgriz and orient it in the sky. Well, it's because I look at the vertical tail and I use the wingtip nav lights to figure out how to orient it while I'm flying it. If the vertical tail is vertical, then it's right side up. If the red light is all I can see, then it's flying left. If you see the red light on the right, then it's coming at you. You get used to it pretty quick, and this is why our review system includes lighting metrics in the avionics and lighting category. Without lighting, orientation definitely becomes harder to keep track of. Let's focus now on the review metrics for agility, starting with whether it's prone to accelerated stalls. Fortunately, it isn't. You'll find it very difficult to put into an accelerated stall if you're maneuvering it with purpose and not just slamming the elevator stick in random directions. Making it less nose-heavy, neutral, or even tail-heavy is possible by removing the stock mixing board and putting a battery as far back as it'll fit. Taking off and landing isn't a struggle if you're used to flying Delta jets. Throttle up smoothly on takeoff and it should launch into the air. If you use full gyro gains, takeoffs are super smooth and graceful. Landing requires holding the nose up and controlling descent with the left stick. You have to get used to power becoming your altitude control, while pitch controls your attitude. It does have adequate thrust in general, though FMS does still insist on selling it with oversized nozzles that don't allow the motor to produce the thrust it's capable of. 3D printed nozzles are a must. They also look better than the paper-thin plastic they use in this jet. Stall recovery is easy. As a Delta wing, just throttle up and push the nose down a little. Rafale earns a 5 out of 5 in agility. Moving on to flight time, Rafale unfortunately suffers a bit in flight time because of the stock nozzle design. Since the nozzles are too large, you don't get the thrust you're expecting at any given stick input. That doesn't mean that it's too underpowered to fly, just that it's going to require more of the left stick to stay in the air, which consequently means less flight time. If you fly on the stock power system with no nozzle mod, you can expect roughly 3 to 4 minutes of flight at most, which earns the Rafale a 3 out of 5. So how do we fix this jet so it's a 5 out of 5 in flight time? Easy! Download better nozzles from Thingiverse, linked below, print them, and install them on the jet. Huge thanks to John Cowand for creating these nozzles and for being a great guy who freely shares knowledge and resources with the model aviation community on RCGroups. Now, you might be saying, I don't have a 3D printer, John. Well, neither did I until recently. Elegoo reached out and sent us a fantastic Neptune 4 printer which we used to create the nozzles on Rafale. And that upgrade improves the plane's overall look and flight characteristics. Consider getting your own affordable 3D printer via the link in the description below and upgrade your Rafale, or print other parts for your planes, or print a whole damn plane if you want to. More on that, soon. And we move on to the real Achilles heel of the Rafale, the landing gear system. It's probably one of the worst that we've ever reviewed on this channel. Yes, the wheels do function, that's a pretty low bar, but one of these days we'll get a plane where the wheels fall apart as they roll or something. At least that's not the problem here. The stock wheels are hard plastic, and they're pretty bad. But the wheels are attached to a suspension system, that's good. The gear system requires a lot of maintenance, that's bad. Why specifically? Because the nose wheel gets caught on the weird linkage system used to steer it on the ground, which can make gear fail to retract or extend unless you add right rudder while you're doing it. That's a really poor design, and it doesn't work flawlessly either. Not just because of the retract issue, but also because the mixing board seems to make the gear doors extend and retract depending on how much throttle you give the jet. It's weird, and it's wrong. So what would improve this score of 2 out of 5? Well, you can do what I did and run everything direct to an AR10360T receiver and sequence the damn gear yourself, which eliminates the random gear door cycle issue and will also automatically rotate the nose wheel so that it can't bind as the gear are pulled up or dropped. Or save yourself the effort and just download the Rafaal setup file from the 2brothers discord server, assuming you're using an IX or NX radio. That way you'd get at least a 4 out of 5 here, and if you want a true 5 out of 5 experience, go for Dubro 2.5 inch low bounce tread it main wheels, and swap out the nose wheel to 1.75 inch tread it low bounce wheels too. Moving on to fit and finish, this Rafaal is gorgeous. It has the typical foam and paint quality that you would normally expect from FMS. The paint isn't blotchy or damaged out of the box, and the foam wasn't bubbly, warped, or otherwise damaged either. That happens more often than companies would like to admit. Sometimes we end up getting weird looking jets right out of the box. Thankfully that wasn't the case here. Rafaal features gapless hinges across the wing with full flying canards, which are super nice, but the canards are driven by this weird u-shaped mechanism that limits their overall travel. Oh so the rudder is foam hinged. I'm giving it a pass here since every other surface is properly hinged, but I really wish the canard setup could be improved in a second version. Come on FMS, update this jet already. Maybe upgrade it to the 90mm class so we'd have enough space up front for a pair of canard servos with pushrods instead of that weird u-shaped mechanism. Rafaal does use stickers instead of decals. That's a fail. They weren't peeling up, but the issue with decals still remains. They're kiss cut instead of die cut, meaning that there's a few millimeters of empty sticker that has no design on it everywhere on the model, and since that empty space isn't transparent like a decal, all of the awesome surface detail they molded into the foam is covered up. On my jet, it's not a problem since I didn't put those god awful Spirit Airlines tiger meat decals on it, but a stock Rafaal will have two thirds of its surface detail covered up with stickers. That's super unfortunate and I think it's long past time for FMS to get away from stickers and move on to decals. At the very least, they weren't peeling up on the plane. Rafaal earns a 4 out of 5 here. Our final review category is avionics and lighting, and Rafaal does ace this category entirely. It uses metal servos, while not quite as nice as the B-11 DLS servos from AGF that I prefer using in the Rosgriz variant, still eminently flyable. I had zero overheating issues on the stock ESC over the years. The Rosgriz variant uses an Avian 100 amp ESC and that stays relatively cool throughout the flights, even in summer. It does contain a lighting system, and the lighting is correct. On the Rosgriz version, I use a blinking light where the plastic cap is on the spine of the jet, and I operate it with a freewing LED controller. The battery tray is designed well, though the overall design of the jet limits the amount of battery that you can get away with, and I think that's a good thing, because bigger batteries don't always mean something flies better. A lot of my flying was done on SMC 5900 V2 high voltage packs, but some of my most daring flying was done with SMC 4000 V2 high voltage packs. You'll get very close to tail heavy with the 4000 pack, but you'll still get a respectable, neutral center of gravity with the 5900 if you run all the wiring direct to the receiver and put the receiver as far back as it can go. Rafale gets a 5 out of 5 in avionics and lighting. The overall score for the jet's final appearance on the channel, at least in its current form, is 19 out of 25. Rafale suffers the most in landing gear and flight time, but you can fix these issues so that they're not an issue. It depends on how much you love the jet. Now me, personally, I absolutely adore delta wing jets with canards, and I will do quite a bit to make them fly as good as I know they can fly, and Rafale is definitely up there as one of the better jets that you can get, assuming that you put in the work to make it happen. Oh, and it would be silly to show the jet flying without demonstrating the gyro gains, so here they are on screen. You will definitely want to lower your roll gains a bit, and I do recommend programming the inboard elevons in AS3X plus to stabilize the jet in both roll and pitch. It takes a little work, but it's worth it for the fly by wire feel that you'll get. Notice how much more effective AS3X plus is compared to the original AS3X system. Rafale uses the same center of gravity in these two video clips. Here, in this first one, I roll out of an inverted high alpha pass, and it immediately stalls and gets alpha locked into a tree. In the second vid, at the same center of gravity, I roll out of inverted high alpha, and the jet continues on like nothing happened. Spectrum haters, can't explain that. If you like this jet and you want to support what we do here at Two Brothers RC, pick it up at fmshobby.com via the link below using the code 35RAFALE-TVRC. Just copy and paste it in the checkout below. Save yourself some cash, help provide us with a small amount of money for helping you be informed about what you're buying. I think it's win-win personally. Now, if you want to go even further and you want to be a channel member and help us review airplanes that never get sent out to demo, hop over to twobrosrc.com slash supporters and sign up for a channel membership. Quite a few of you guys paid for a year in advance, which is absolutely mind-blowing to me, giving us the ability to buy the Freewing F-22 lineup for you. Look out for that coming up soon. My most enormous heartfelt thanks to everyone on screen right now, especially Sarasota RC Squadron and Michael Smith. You guys are awesome, you kick so much ass. Thank you guys again. See you next week with a look at the OMP FunStick 65. Yes, it's a stick, but it's way more capable than you thought it was.