Hi!
IR control doesn't work outside because the natural light is full of infrared radiation and this will upset the transmission. It's like trying to tell someone a word while a jet engine is a few metres away from you and him. The IR control would work at night but who is playing with helicopters at night?
About turning a helicopter into and aircraft, it is a bit more complicated stuff. I have 2 IR helicopters which could shoot one to another with IR (in fact one helicopter is really a transmitter and one is the receiver and when the first heli shots, the second receives the command and ''crashes'' and viceversa, a game for two players. It is called Sky Challengers) Unfortunately one got damaged and couldn't fly anymore (the battery was faulty too) and I tried to turn it into a plane, but it was more complicated than I thought.
You know that a helicopter, when it takes off, it has both antirotor and the main rotor working ALL THE TIME , the two can be controlled so that you can turn left, right, up and down.
In the case of an airplane, the engine is working all the time, but the elerons and rudder servos are OFF when flying in straight line. And this leads to a problem when you want to mount the receiver on a plane. It's a matter of programming and/or adding an external circuit so that you can modify the command.
The simplest RC plane has only 2 channels, one for the engine, and the other one for the rudder. Ok, I don't know how many channels has your module, but modifying won't be as easy as thought. It would be possible, but ths means to modify the receiver, or adding external circuit which adds more weight on your plane, especially if is a small one.
The easiest way is to find another destroyed plane, but with the circuitry intact, and build another fuselage, wings and tail.
Andrei