Building remotely controlled
airliner model planes since 1971 I started with a 1/23th scale Vickers Super
VC-10 and a 1/13th scale Fokker F-28. Both planes were built using foam and
balsa only. They were powered by two .40 glow engines each.
It became clear that a common
scale would give a better look when a number of these planes were standing side
by side. Choosing an 1/16th scale made it possible to build most of those days’
airliners at reasonable sizes. After my first planes I knew that the nose and
tail cone of the fuselage were very difficult to build so I decided to make
moulds. These devices could now manufactured much easier as fibreglass parts.
For the engine nacelles and the vertical stabilizer I made moulds too. The
center fuselage can easily be built with foam and balsa giving a much lighter
structure than a full fibreglass fuselage. Wings and horizontal stabilizer are
also built with foam/balsa.
Those fibreglass parts are (illustrated by
DC-10 / MD-11):
Nose section of the fuselage Tail section of the fuselage with Engine
nacelles
vertical
stabilizer
From early on other modellers
were interested in building these airliner models. With the fibreglass parts
supplied by me and a small drawing they were able to build their own models.
Foam cores of centre fuselage, wings and horizontal stabilizer are
provided by Manfred Köster. Retractable
landing gears for these airliners are produced by Hawe-Modelltechnik. Of course building
and flying of this kind of model aircraft requires a well-experienced pilot.
In the beginning all models
were designed to use glow engines with propellers but now all of them can also
be equipped with ducted fans (electric or glow engine) or turbines. Well known
are the planes of Peter Michel who had built a large number of my designs using
all variants of suitable powerplants.
During the last decades a
large number of 1/16th scale airliners has been built not only by me but also
by many other modellers. The following pages show some of these planes. For the
quality of the pictures please keep in mind that I had to scan photographs aged
up to 40 years.
Airbus: A300 A310 A320 A330 A340
Ilyushin: IL-62
McDonnell
Douglas: DC-8 DC-9 DC-10 MD-80 MD-11
Sud
Aviation: Caravelle
Tupolev: 154
e-Mail: info@rauch-airliner.com
Airliner-related links: Carsten
Scharf