Hey guys haven't been on here or owned a rc plane before.
Looking for some direction, basically I want to build a good sized plane I can strap a video camera to and fly around the mountains. I do a ton of dirtbiking across a couple mountains nearby, rumored there are 100+ abandoned copper, silver, gold and quartz mines scattered throughout the mountains. Would be really cool to be able to locate and ride to a few of them haven't seen one in the 20 years I have been riding up there.

My thought is i want to build a plane body and get the engine controls and actuators needed to fly. I work construction and come across tons of rigid foam insulation bound for the dumpster, thin sheet metal from hvac ducting, etc...
I'm not too worried about the actual building process, what I need to figure out is the controlling and specific parameters of the design. I can usually get to a pretty good hilltop vantage point but it would be nice to not need LOS to control it since carrying a large fragile plane up a mountain on a dirt bike may be hard to do...

My big questions and concerns are

Are the GPS based control systems doable on a fairly tight budget? If so what should i be looking into?
I have seen some setups you can program a flight path into and have it fly itself around a loop and back which would be ideal, launch from a clearing, make a few mile loop along a set of valleys to record and come back, if I could takeover control to land I feel like it may be safer for the plane

Is there a kit I can buy with the basic actuators, control hardware and such?

I have seen many sizes of engines on ebay, I would assume I want to aim big like the .91 or similar, would need decent fuel capacity to stay up 15minutes, with gas just over 6lb/gallon one gallon would require a decent wingspan to keep up.

I will be looking at the info threads just wanted to post up what I was looking for