Boats Are Great and All, but What If They Could Also Fly?

Fans of RC vehicles have a lot of choices these days, and you can find inexpensive RC versions of just about any full-size land, sea, or air vehicle you can think of. That, of course, includes RC boats, and you can have a lot of fun zipping around a ponds right out of the box. But, if you get bored of being confined to the water, you can follow YouTuber Peter Sripol’s lead and turn your RC boat into a flying plane.

Sripol has a passion for RC vehicles, and flying machines in particular. His YouTube channel is full of impressive builds, and we’ve covered some of his work before, like this electric propeller sled and this toaster submarine. Now Sripol is back with a new video that shows how he converted a simple RC boat into a plane that actually flies. It can cruise around on the ocean, and then seamlessly take to the skies.

The build started with the wings, which Sripol formed by hand from foam board. It’s impressive that he understands airfoils so well that he can just eyeball the profile. Those were glued to the body with simple wood dowels, and then a pair of motors were mounted to the wings. After some testing and tuning in a pool, Sripol took the boatplane to the ocean for the real test. There, it performed well in both the water and the air, which is a testament to just how good Sripol is at building flying machines.