



It’s the NCC-1701D as you’ve never seen her: running lights on, in the air and actually flying. It’s not the full scale Star Trek iconic ship from Star Trek: The Next Generation, though. It’s a flying model.

A model builder on YouTube calling himself TheMiro59 has built a flying model of the USS Enterprise. He’s not the first to build a flying Enterprise, but his is probably the best to date. The shape of the ship’s hull may be aerodynamic, more or less, but it’s not especially stable in flight until the model gets up to speed – then it soars, and it creates an incredible visual as it does its near flyby’s in the dusk with the lights on. It makes your heart skip a beat watching it.

The first video details its construction and its first half dozen test flights or so. The original ERTL model of the Enterprise served as Miro’s inspiration, and his fully tricked out display model was gorgeous – but something made of the same material would never fly. Miro got plans from the internet and rebuilt the ship from scratch, using foam core. A large (and unfortunately noisy) pusher prop is affixed to the hull where the shuttlecraft launch bays would have been. The flaps are made from the trailing edges of the main saucer section. The ailerons are the trailing edge of the engineering hull. Once he got the hang of how it should be balanced and all the controls worked out, he lit it using fiber optics and super-bright LED’s.

In flight, the disk of the main hull presents the biggest problem to stability. It is essentially providing no left at all, and the ship has to be flown with the nose tilted slightly up so that it functions more like a propeller driven kite than a normal aircraft. It also makes it difficult to keep from stalling out, as once that nose dips down below the flight line, all that air pressure is now fighting hard to keep it there. It’s also a bit fluttery and sensitive to the wind currents, so Miro discovers that flying it faster makes it more stable, not less. It takes a great deal of practice to learn the delicate balance between thrust and angle to keep it aloft, but by the second video he’s discovered that he has better control at higher speeds.

A project like this may not be so far beyond your reach as a hobbyist as you think . On his web site Miro says that before he built this flying Enterprise RC model, he had never flown an RC aircraft before. He bought himself a trainer aircraft and learned to fly on that one before he tried launching his creation into the skies.

TheMiro59’s Enterprise is a testament to his ingenuity, and a proud moment for Star Trek fans the world over who can vicariously share in his achievement.

We just think it’s neat. Pardon us while we watch the videos again.

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Links

Miro’s web site, in both English and Russian, which details the construction of the project