In one of his books, Austerlitz, the title character goes flying at night with pilot friend Gerald Fitzpatrick in a “Cessna.” He describes the mesmerizing sight of the familiar constellations overhead. Now, looking up at the stars from an airplane is an entrancing experience, but no one ever had it in a Cessna.

The corresponding photograph, though somewhat distant and blurred, is clearly not of a Cessna but of a small twin-engine, twin-finned airplane that does, however, have a transparent canopy. I got the explanation for this apparent authorial fumble from a Swiss friend: Among nonpilots in Germany, “Cessna” would simply mean a private airplane, no particular brand.

The twin was actually a Miles Gemini, an airplane brought into being, like the original Beech Bonanza, by the anticipated postwar explosion in demand for personal air travel. It had four seats and was equipped with two 100 hp engines of the inverted in-line variety, housed in those nice narrow cowlings that many British and French aircraft of the 1930s and ’40s had. One of its unusual features was a big external airfoil flap.

Despite the flap, however, the published stalling speed of 35 knots cannot have been a calibrated airspeed—45 is more plausible.

Whatever its real landing speed, the fictional Gerald Fitzpatrick crashed fatally in his Gemini. His friend Austerlitz gloomily comments that this was bound to happen, since he was so fond of making sightseeing flights in the south of France.

• READ MORE: Looking at the Physics of STOL Drag

Novelists just won’t give private planes a break.

I wondered how the 3,000-pound Gemini would do on one engine. Late designer John Thorp, contemplating a trip to Europe with his wife, Kay, once propped up a couple of small Lycomings in front of his two-seat Sky Skooter. His friend George Wing, creator of the ubiquitous Hi-Shear rivet, happened to walk in, and thus was conceived the Wing Derringer.

Wing was not taking any chances on O-235s, however. The two-seat Derringer, with 160 hp O-320s, could definitely climb on one engine. The question of how a twin with 100 hp engines climbs on only one was answered, however, by the Champion Lancer, whose woeful single-engine performance was, like Sir John Falstaff, a cause of wit in many men.

Like many other early aviation enthusiasts, Frederick George Miles began in the 1920s as an amateur builder. Miles then started manufacturing small airplanes and eventually turned out a series of products that recalls, in its variety and inventiveness, the career of another homebuilder-turned-professional, Burt Rutan. Like Rutan, who started the Rutan Aircraft Factory with his then-wife Carolyn, Miles found a business partner in his remarkable wife Maxine, nicknamed Blossom, who, in addition to being his beloved, was a pilot, aeronautical engineer, stress analyst, and businesswoman.

In some respects, the paths of Miles and Rutan were different. Miles made airplanes for military and commercial use. Rutan, after leaving the homebuilt plans business that had launched his career, mainly produced one-off prototypes and never certificated any of his designs. (Beech ruined the Starship, he complained, in the process of certificating it. Beech engineers naturally took a different view of the matter.) But the two shared a wide-ranging versatility. Some designers, like Thorp and Dick VanGrunsven, turn out incremental variations and improvements on a basic theme.

With Miles and Rutan, you never knew what might come next. In Miles’ case the variety may have been due in part to his employing other designers, whereas Rutan designed all of his airplanes himself. Both men mastered the art of fast prototyping: Scaled Composites, the company Rutan founded, exploited foam-cored composites for that purpose; Miles’ medium was resin-bonded wood.

Miles’ greatest commercial success came during the pre-World War II years. He developed a number of training and transport airplanes and manufactured them in large numbers for the Royal Air Force. His efforts to produce a fighter were less successful. A 1940 prototype of a small wooden “emergency” fighter, proposed to stop the gap in the event that Hurricane and Spitfire production were hampered by German bombing, had a bubble canopy and a stock Merlin “power egg,” and looked just like a miniature Hawker Typhoon. Despite fixed landing gear, it rivaled the Hurricane in armament and performance, but it was never produced, mainly because the anticipated emergency did not materialize.

During the war, Miles produced a design remarkably similar in conception to Rutan’s first homebuilt. Like the VariViggen, Miles’ original Libellula—Latin for dragonfly—had a single pusher propeller, low wing, and high canard. The configuration was supposed to solve several problems associated with shipboard fighters, but the British Admiralty didn’t bite. A second version, this one with a high wing and low canard, was conceived as a bomber, with the idea that the tandem wing arrangement would provide an unusually large CG range. That airplane also ended up on the scrap heap.

The little Gemini twin, the one illustrated in Austerlitz, was a commercial success, as was a side venture the resourceful Miles got into: ballpoint pens. But the most striking Miles design from the wartime period was something completely different.

• READ MORE: Recalling a Good Pilot Friend and One Curious Character

The M.52, born in 1943, is said to have been the offspring of a ridiculous error. An intercepted German communication referred to the 1,000 kph speed of one of the jets then being developed. Someone failed to perform the conversion, and the belief took root that the Germans were perfecting a 1,000 mph airplane. Inevitably, the British felt they needed to follow suit, and Miles Aircraft earned the contract. (If it isn’t true, at least it’s a good story.)

The result was a 5-foot-diameter cylinder with thin, straight wings and a then-unprecedented, and prescient, powered all-flying stabilizer. Air for its centrifugal-compressor jet engine came in through an annular intake surrounding a shock cone, à la the MiG-17 or SR-71. The pilot sat inside the shock cone. In retrospect, the design looks sound except for its lack of area ruling, and it could probably have gone supersonic, given sufficient thrust. But in 1946, with the first prototype nearly complete, the U.K.’s Air Ministry suddenly canceled the project.

The abrupt cancellation, which was never persuasively explained, fueled a persistent notion among British airplane buffs that their government had abjectly bowed to U.S. insistence on being the first to “break the sound barrier.” Indeed, the Bell X-1 rocket aircraft, which did so in 1947, was being developed at the same time as the M.52.

However, the M.52 may have been shelved simply because of the distinct possibility that its still-unproven afterburning turbojet might not be powerful enough to propel it past Mach 1 in level flight—let alone to 1,000 mph.

This column first appeared in the May 2024/Issue 948 of FLYING’s print edition.

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The post Gallery: The Evolution of Van’s Aircraft appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

But countering the success of the company’s designs and their unprecedented popularity were challenges compounded by the COVID pandemic, a failure by a key supplier and missteps of its own. Monday’s Chapter 11 filing gives some clues to the situation Van’s faces that pushed the company into a form of bankruptcy that most often precedes a reorganization and recovery. (Van’s is not liquidating. Chapter 11 is designed to give a company some relief from liabilities and enable a reorganization into a sustainable business.)

In the Chapter 11 declaration is this summary: “Until recently Van’s operated successfully without bank loans or other lines of credit, relying on customer deposits and earnings for its working capital.” But then Van’s faced “a combination of unforeseen, significant events occurring over a relatively short period of time increased Debtor’s [Van’s Aircraft’s] costs, doubled its normal inventory levels, slowed deliveries, and strained Debtor’s cash flow to the breaking point.” Support from founder Dick VanGrunsven since September has kept the company afloat.

• READ MORE: Van’s Aircraft Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection

One could argue that Van’s trouble started with an issue regarding quickbuild kits. The offshore constructor failed to adequately corrosion-proof parts of the assembly, which led Van’s to a time-consuming side project to understand the nature of the problem and its scope, and construct a remedy. The issue is described in the declaration as a “multi-million-dollar setback” for Van’s. Moreover, it contributed to a growing backlog in ordered kits and extended delivery times for customers.

At the same time, there was unprecedented demand for kits during the early stages of COVID. (In fact, the entire homebuilt industry witnessed a surge in popularity, with all major kit manufacturers reporting greatly increased sales in 2020 and 2021.) For Van’s, kit sales rose from 1594 during 2019 (already a very good number for the company) to 2508 in 2020 and 3982 in 2021. According to the filing, revenue actually decreased from $31.5 million in 2019 to $31.1 million in 2020, despite a 1000-unit increase in orders. Van’s didn’t get the bulk of the kit payment until shipment. In 2021, however, the big increases in order began to show up in revenue, increasing to $37.6 million in 2021 and $52.6 million in 2022. Net income, as described in the declaration, was $2.6 million in 2019, $3 million in 2020, but dropped to $2.1 million in 2021 as investments to increase capacity began to appear in the financials. In 2022, Van’s net income turned red, with a loss of $3.3 million; it lost $1 million through the end of August this year against revenues of $43 million.

It’s important to understand that Van’s was already operating at or near capacity in 2019. Along with technical changes to the kits over time that placed more work at the factory (steps the builder would not have to perform, an expectation in the modern kit-aircraft world), Van’s found itself with greatly increased demand and set about finding ways to meet it.

Because the vast majority of the company’s kit parts are known as “pre-punched” parts and the machines that do the punching formed the production roadblock, Van’s looked for ways to increase capacity by outsourcing some of this step. One way was to have the parts normally punched instead have their holes cut by a laser. This is a common method for automating manufacture of sheet metal parts, along with CNC routers, punches and water-jet cutting. In fact, Van’s had been using laser cutting for some parts and then elected to laser-cut more of them.

Builders began to notice that some laser-cut parts would crack during the dimpling process—where the metal is formed for the purpose of installing flush rivets—and that eventually started Van’s engineering department down the path of discovering why this was happening. Many builders felt that Van’s was slow to acknowledge the problem and that by the time it did, there was a significant quantity of laser-cut parts out in the world. Van’s turned its full attention to the problem and identified the parts in question—more recently, they were able to far more accurately predict which specific airplane kits were likely to have the suspect parts. Latest estimates are that some 1800 kits are affected.

These issues would challenge many companies but they were compounded by other events, as the declaration shows. “Van’s order file doubled in the 2020 and 2021 period. At the same time, supply chain issues, and supplier shutdowns slowed productions of key components, increasing back orders and delaying order completions, requiring Debtor to hire and train more staff. Wages increased, and shipping costs rose more than four-fold during this period. Stated simply, without realizing it, Debtor was selling a high volume of aircraft kits below its cost. The combination of all these factors overstressed Van’s workforce, operating support systems and management skills resulting in a series of one-off but very costly errors.” The declaration also notes that, “Some of its senior employees with deep familiarity with both office and manufacturing process workings chose to retire during COVID.”

The picture painted is of a company overwhelmed by overlapping challenges, started by the primer issue with quickbuild kits and followed closely by a global pandemic that simultaneously cut into its manufacturing capacity, dramatically increased costs and, perhaps ironically, also greatly boosted demand. That in the effort to catch up with demand the company also lost track of internal costs and failed to increase kit prices (as one remedy) is one inescapable takeaway from the factual descriptions in the Chapter 11 declaration—and a good indication of the remedies needed to define its path forward.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on KITPLANES.

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