FliteTest Turns a LEGO City Arctic Air Transport Into a Real Quadcopter

The best part of playing with LEGO as a kid is that it’s an outlet for your imagination. Sure, your blocky starship can’t really cruise across the galaxy and fight space battles, but you can imagine that it does. Unfortunately, as adults, our imagination withers and we stop being satisfied with make-believe. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t make real flying LEGO vehicles! Which is why FliteTest’s LEGO City Arctic Air Transport quadcopter conversion is so cool.

The FliteTest YouTube channel is all about strange multirotor builds, like the flying quadcopter basketball shoes we featured last year. In their latest build, they tackled a far more important question: can you make a LEGO aircraft actually fly? The answer, as you probably guessed since we’re writing about the build, is yes. Of course, making it happen is still a challenge.

The Arctic Air Transport already looks like a small drone, but there are still size constraints. The LEGO body obviously isn’t completely hollow, and those blocks take up space. So, FliteTest chose the smallest components they could find. That includes a Flite Test HGLRC XJB F438 Stack, which is a combination ESC (electronic speed control) and flight controller unit intended for micro quadcopters.

That drives four of FliteTest’s own Radial 1806 2280kV brushless DC motors. A tiny Kinexsis 11.1V 800mAh 3S 30C LiPo battery provides the power, and a Spectrum RC DSMX Quad Race Receiver is used for the radio signal. The FliteTest team used some careful block modification to mount those components, taking care to hide as much as possible within the body. The final result is almost indistinguishable from a regular LEGO City Arctic Air Transport, and flies very well!