Hi,

Good answers above,

I would add only this; Fuel, glow fuel is about 12 to 14 US dollars per gallon when purchased at a hobby shop.

I am rather suprised that someone studying aeronautics hasn't spent thier life building and flying model airplanes.

Building UAV's in the manner in which you are proposing has become fairly commonplace and can be built almost entirely from "off the shelf" components. I don't know how impressive your thesis would be considering it is little more than purchasing consumer products and assembling them. It seems like a dead thesis walking to me.

However, you can gain a very valuable and practical understanding of airfoils which is far beyond thier qualities and quantities described in text books. And you can actually gain experience using new materials and new constuction techniques. I do believe a modeler has a clear advantage over a non-modeler, ( if there is such an engineer). So I believe modelling will help you, but I feel you might keep an open mind about your possible thesis .