Ultra Micro Parkzone T28 Trojan – Reviewed

At the time of writing this article, the Parkzone Ultra Micro Trojan is the hottest contender for “best beginner plane” of the year award. We have selected and reviewed 21 planes over a five month period and by using a grid for grading the different strengths and weaknesses of each plane hope that the review due for release in ten days time will prove invaluable to people in the remote control plane business The article is the largest of it’s kind ever done and all planes have been assessed relative to each other, giving far greater accuracy than comparing planes written by different reviewers.

We have, to date, spent five months putting the article together and it is currently not on schedule but will be published on this site during the third week of November 2010. But enough on what’s coming up, let’s tell you about how fantastic this little plane is!

 (See 21 Best RC electric planes compared – this site)

The Ultra Micro Trojan plane was selected by us from the vast diverse supply of planes available from www.rchobbies.com.au. But I must confess that I didn’t expect it to completely surpass my expectations. I should have seen it coming though, as big brother, the Parkzone Trojan T28D, under test conditions was found to be a superb plane and may also be a winner of it’s class (see review on this site). 

This little plane comes as RTF or BNF and we obtained the RTF. The battery position is the same as the popular Hobbyzone Champ (also reviewed previously on this site) and in fact you could use the same battery as it has marginally more capacity -150Mah. All we had to do to go flying was to install the landing gear which took us all of 45 seconds. You could leave it off and hand launch if you preferred.

PIC TX & Charger
Transmitter
Put in the supplied four “AA” batteries and you immediately have the fully operational 2.4 GHz TX DSM2 technology. Flick a switch to the Mode you want, Mode 1 or Mode 2, select high or low rates (just press the control stick down) and the red LED blinking indicates the rate you are on. It is so good that for once I do not see any advantage in using an upspeced TX such as the DX6i or DX8.

Charger
An excellent fully portable charger powered by four AA batteries with fool proof battery plug in.

Features
• Comes out of the box completely assembled with Spektrum AR6400 6-Channel DSM2 Receiver/ESC/Servos Unit installed
• Full 4 channel control – throttle, aileron, elevator and rudder
• Everything you need to get flying comes in the box – even the batteries
• ParkZone 2.4GHz transmitter featuring Spektrum DSM2 technology, 120 mAh LiPo Battery, and DC Charger included
• Landing gear features a steerable nose wheel and can easily be removed for a “retracted gear” look

Build Quality

As usual with the Hobbyzone/Parkzone, the build quality was good. If you want to treat it rough, then get a couple of carbon fibre strips to put along the wings longitudinally for a bit more strength, especially for very high winds like I have been flying in. The plane required NO fine tuning and flew just great straight out of the box. I might add that 14 crashes later, it still flies great. Don’t be concerned that this little plane has a geared drive for we have experienced no trouble whatsoever with the power train or elevators, rudder or ailerons.

The most we have had to do was to retape the nose after our many crashes in the high winds during the tests to find it’s ceiling in wind handling capabilities.