The terrain is unremittingly flat, the roads checkerboard at right angles, and farming is what matters. Irrigation ditches and muddy tracks entering and then tapering off on the county roads are too numerous to notice, and the vastness in the crop rows and vault of open sky keeps human activity properly scaled inside nature’s expanse.

But it is California. The land work is mainly agribusiness, row crops defer to orchards of nut and fruit trees, and corn is something that happens elsewhere. Those majestic peaks suggest things aren’t the same everywhere while State Route 99 rumbles and roars its endless nose-to-tail hustle of tractor-trailers and passenger cars traversing the world’s fifth-largest economy.

A couple miles from that highway an industrial park sprawls before giving way to the main business of California’s central valley. And there, sandwiched between a multiacre pallet manufacturer and pump specialists, an unremarkable cluster of single-story metal buildings and open yards make up the Ly-Con Aircraft Engines huddle.

• READ MORE: GE Aerospace on the Hunt for Engineering Talent

One is tempted to say “campus” to describe this jumble of buildings, yards, shipping containers, and open-air pallet racking stacked with tired aviation hardware, but the connotation is too collegiate. Likewise, “village” is too visually congenial and hamlet dismissive of the overpowering mechanical nature of the place. But if the correct label is elusive, there’s no doubt exceptional general aviation engines emerge from here.

‘Tunnell’ Vision

Central to the Ly-Con story is founder Ken Tunnell, a native of the next big farming town down the road, Porterville. Just 23 years old and starting to settle from a rambunctious youth along with a three-year stint in the Marine Corps, Ken had already been working in a five-man aviation engine shop when in March 1980 he thought he could do better by opening his own place.

His dad borrowed against his modest retirement to purchase a few basic machine tools in exchange for a stake in the business, and married-with-a-mortgage friend Bruce Bennet came on board three months later when Ken was sufficiently established to afford employee insurance. Ken recalls Bruce as a great engine guy, but he left Ly-Con after a couple of years to pursue his own interests.

In the beginning Ken says Ly-Con was like everyone else in that it would take new parts out of the box and start assembling engines. But as the engine count grew, Ken realized new parts weren’t always perfect—or even correct—and customer comebacks didn’t make them happy or make money.

And so the Ly-Con obsession with measuring, verifying, and accurate machining began. This now 44-year fascination with improvement through better processes and tools has been Ly-Con’s hallmark and the main generator of its worldwide reputation for dependable, powerful engines.

It’s likely the dogged zeitgeist of the place has been set by its geography. Visalia and Porterville are successful, somewhat isolated farming towns. Getting up in the morning and getting to work is native to the area, as is the resolve to use the best tools at hand and to get better ones tomorrow. Ken and his 36 employees are all salt of the earth, typically self-taught but ready to work and willing to try something new or learn from others. Their methods are empirical, and if there’s not a single engineering diploma hanging on the office walls—or a pilot’s certificate in anyone’s wallet—there are a hundred signed photos from pleased customers showing off every sort of flat-engined airplane winging via Ly-Con power.

• READ MORE: Boeing to Open New Engineering Facility at Embry-Riddle

A textbook definition of a mom-and-pop store, Ly-Con remains Ken Tunnell’s fiefdom, with just wife Darla (accounting) and brother Bryan (racing shop) also involved. There’s the efficiency of a benevolent dictatorship in the arrangement but also the bottleneck of everything going across Ken’s paper-covered desk. As the business has grown, so have the responsibilities, including the impedimenta associated with FAA Repair Station status and doing business in the Golden State. Ken and Darla have been at the shop seven days a week forever, and if there is a complaint from the field, it’s that Ly-Con is a slow shop, a place where engines languish and getting Ken on the phone is tough to do.

It’s tough because there is so much to attend to, and once you get Ken on the line, he tends to stay there until things are fully settled. He isn’t one to cut corners, and projects can pile up. He says most of the caterwauling is from customers hoping to speed up things, but dawdling on the payment continuum or from pilgrims thinking engine shops keep rebuilt engines on the shelf waiting to go. With an average turnaround time of eight months, the reality is Ly-Con’s delivery schedule compares well with the year or years now common from the OEMs.

Early On

Today, Ly-Con is noted as a horizontally opposed specialist with a strong sideline on performance engines, but those are learned behaviors.

“When we first started, we did [Pratt & Whitney] 1340s and 985s due to crop dusting around the valley,” recalls Ken. “But it was 250 man hours to do a radial and 40 hours to do a flat motor, and you made about the same money. So we started leaning toward flat engines and away from radials. But we did some [Warner] Scarabs and Franklins before they all faded away.”

One niche picked up via Bob Penland was helicopter engines.

“He taught us the VO (helicopter) engines,” Ken says. “Penland in Long Beach was the helo king in those days. We still do 435s, 540s, and all that stuff…We still build ’em for helos all around the world—Germany, Canada, New Zealand. People are scared of ’em, but if you do a good job, they’re a really durable engine.” He adds with a grin, “Unless you don’t have a prop governor and overspeed ’em!”

• READ MORE: Transport Canada Awards Pratt & Whitney Engine Type Certification

In the early years Ly-Con was just one of many engine shops in the valley, so capitalizing growth in the company was difficult. Characteristically unafraid to try something different, Ken saw an opportunity when Rocky Harrow, another local machinist, ran into trouble. With the bank ready to repossess Rocky’s shop, Ken paid off the debt then moved Rocky and his entire operation, including a lathe, mill, and pantograph, into Ly-Con.

“We brought him into the shop to do machining, reground lifters, connecting rods, that sort of stuff,” Ken says. “And so I spent some of my time hustling machine shop stuff. We made helical gears for a printing press company. I got the right wire and spray welding on the gears so Rocky could go portable to fix those gears when they dropped a screw in them or something.”

Eventually Rocky left, but by then Ly-Con was established in the aviation engine scene, with good contacts and a growing customer base.

“We were on the [Visalia] airport for nine years,” says Ken, noting he made the painfully disruptive move to the company’s present industrial park location a couple of miles away in 1989.

He says he was encouraged to relocate due to a 60 percent rise in rent in just two years, along with a court order kicking them out after he disputed the rent increases.

“We almost went out of business because of the move,” he says. “We were just five people and 3,000 square feet, but it took [electrical utility] Edison a long time to put in three-phase power [and there was no money coming in the meantime.]”

Ken came to see the move off-airport as a plus.

“It was a lot cooler being on the airport, but you can’t own anything at the airport, the city owns it,” he says. “Here you can build equity in the real estate, so it was a blessing getting off the airport.”

Enter Performance

Earning competence with stock rebuilds marked Ly-Con’s start, so when Ken hooked up with Southern California speed guru Steve Mehalick, the company was ready to add performance. The pivot was John Harmon—just down the road in Bakersfield—building the first two Van’s RV-3-based Rockets.

The first used a stock Lycoming, but backer Jim Ewing wanted more horse pressure in his Rocket engine that Ly-Con was building. So Steve taught Ly-Con about porting, high compression, and other power-building tips he’d learned working with Dan Gurney, JE Pistons, Jim Fueling, and others in the extensive Southern California speed scene. Ken credits Steve’s knowledge and industry contacts with quickly pushing Ly-Con to the front ranks of performance aircraft engine builders, and it was a tough loss when Steve medically retired far too early 20 years ago.

Ly-Con’s other performance pioneer was Sean Tucker.

“We did his stuff for 43 years,” says Ken. “He was a crop duster in Salinas…He used to hock his house to get parts to do his engines.”

Sean didn’t have to hock his house forever, and Ly-Con rose up the performance ladder with his outstanding career. Other major aerobatic acts gravitated to Ly-Con’s thumping, lightweight parallel-valve AEIO-540 engines, including Jim LeRoy, Skip Stewart, and about three-quarters of the Red Bull Air Racing field until they went to spec engines from Thunderbolt to limit costs and performance.

Improving performance is catnip to Ken. He can come across as aw-shucks, but that’s just his native impishness papering over a deep competitive streak.

“I just like to have the best stuff,” he says. His attraction to the latest tools also means satisfaction in turning out no-excuse stock engines plus winning races and being the big dog on the pro airshow scene. He really doesn’t like second place.

No doubt the most visible of Ly-Con’s power habit has been air racing, with the Formula 1, Biplane, and Sport pits at Reno, Nevada, presenting an almost embarrassing array of Ly-Con stickers. Like the early Red Bull series, Ly-Con’s penetration of Formula 1 was typically more than half the field, and it was something similar in the hot-rodded Biplane class.

The Biplane efforts have been capped so far by overwhelming Ly-Con power (think almost 400 hp from a naturally aspirated IO-360) in Phantom pushing lap speeds over 260 mph. In the major-league Sport Gold division, Ly-Con provided the 580-cubic-inch foundations for class dominator Jeff LaVelle’s 410 mph Glasair III along with numerous other competitors.

All of these engines bend the status quo when it comes to power, but the 900-plus hp under LaVelle’s cowling truly stretches the imagination regarding what’s possible with the same cases and crankshafts the rest of us fly behind.

For sure, Ly-Con’s push to performance has paid dividends for all its customers. It was broken counterweight ears on the hardcore tumbling aerobatic engines that led to the cryogenic solution Ly-Con now offers. If a daily driver customer balks at the thought of 10:1 compression pistons, Ly-Con can authoritatively speak to what happens not only at 10:1 compression, but 11:1, 12:1, even 14:1 because it has built and run numerous engines at all of those power levels. Or 5.5:1 compression for turbo fans.

The same goes for about every sort of power trick imaginable because Ly-Con has firsthand experience developing those engines, along with the customer feedback plus tearing down and eyeballing the results.

In the Shop

Today Ly-Con’s 36 employees work on a 3.2-acre lot holding four buildings, two dyno cells, one vertical test stand, and several yards full of shipping containers and pallet racking containing the company’s extensive core engine collection. There are approximately 26,000 square feet under roof and 7,000 square feet of working shop space. You’ll have difficulty finding an unoccupied horizontal surface large enough to set down your coffee cup.

Collectively, the facilities support an FAA Repair Station, including engine and engine accessory overhaul. The FAA sees Ly-Con as two entities, one repairing and building certified engines, which makes up about 70 percent of the overall business, plus the experimental engine work making up the remaining 30 percent.

The certified and experimental work pass through the same workstations—that is, there is no separate building or shop dedicated to either class of engines—but the parts, processes, and paperwork are carefully segregated to ensure compliance.

Organizationally there is the business office, teardown, cleaning, inspection, painting and coating, welding, porting, cryogenic, case, accessory, assembly, dyno and shipping shops or stations.

The parts department is its own business—Kendra Air Parts Inc.—but located with the rest of Ly-Con. There’s a room dedicated to Ly-Con’s proprietary line of NFS pistons too.

You could also say manufacturing is a Ly-Con subset as it makes its own adjustable oil pressure regulators and dabbles with custom valve covers and other miscellaneous parts, but this work slots in among the regular jobs. The same might be said about the more experimental work, such as flow testing cylinder heads or trying new coatings, but again those workstations are shared with the mainstream certified efforts.

The Machine Age

Consistently adding new machining and testing capabilities means Ly-Con reached the usual level of in-house capabilities long ago.

Those few specialized machining steps—crank grinding and machining engine cases are good examples—are or were farmed out to specialists just like every other engine builder. With the basics covered, Ly-Con eventually moved into unusual capabilities rarely offered by an aircraft engine builder, mainly driven by its need to step up its experimental engines as the aerobatic and racing customers asked for more power or ran into longevity issues.

One of the first of these was a wet flow bench for flowing carburetors and fuel injection parts but also key to developing cylinder head ports. By adding on to a commercially available automotive performance flow bench designed to move just air, the fuel bench does the same task but while flowing air and solvent. The combination fuel and flow benches have been educational as carburetors, injection, and cylinder heads got tuned up for racing, as well as serving as a great calibration tool for verifying performance of stock parts for certified applications. Originally built with analog instruments, the fuel bench was later upgraded to digital data acquisition and remains in daily use.

A fundamental part of engine building is improving the ring seal between the cylinder walls and piston rings. This has always been a sloppy thing in big-bore, air-cooled airplane engines—it’s the nature of these beasts—but Ken Tunnell has always been improving ring seal both to increase engine power and reduce oil consumption, along with speeding engine break-in and thus avoid oil-slurping during the engine’s entire lifespan. Key to this is precision in honing the cylinder bores along with experimenting with piston ring material. 

Building so many racing and aerobatic engines gives Ken the opportunity to continuously try different ring/bore combinations, and making some rather large investments in the latest cylinder hones has allowed improving the cylinder finish and chokes. For decades a Sunnen CV-616 hone has been swirling out the cylinders at Ly-Con, but after reaching the limits of that machine on the latest experimental jugs, a new Rottler automated hone was added. That’s a six-figure investment, but Ken needed it for the increased precision, plus, as an automated machine, it will speed cylinder production throughout Ly-Con’s workflow.

Sixteen years ago when Ly-Con wanted to improve crankcase parting-line sealing by replacing the stock sewing thread method with a rubber O-ring set in a machined groove, it needed the hugely increased precision and speed of an automated milling machine for this complex tool path. That meant funding the purchase of a 20 hp CNC machining center, a first in aviation engine rebuilding. Of course, the five-axis Haas Automation CNC mill has since improved or supported all sorts of tasks previously done manually or not at all.

Another unique Ly-Con capability is cryogenic heat treating. This is the use of liquid nitrogen to chill parts to minus-305 degrees Fahrenheit then heating them to 300 F before bringing them back to room temperature. It normalizes the crystalline structure of metal (and other materials) and has proven a godsend in strengthening crankshafts in high-power engines. With “cryo” proving useful throughout an engine, Ken bought out an entire cryo facility and set it up inside Ly-Con. It’s proven popular with performance customers and suggests the way to greater longevity on stock builds as well.

Another big plus are the two engine dynos.

These have been upgraded over the years with good data acquisition systems offering major benefits. First, customers have objective data on how their engine runs, the engines are delivered leak-free and fully vetted as to function along with being well along the critical break-in period. Furthermore, the dynos prove whatever was done in the shop.

Especially for the experimental engines, the dynos close an essential feedback loop on what works or doesn’t when improving engine builds. Having just brought both dynos to identical specification and data capabilities has sped workflow as it’s no longer necessary to wait for one or the other dyno to open up for a specific testing need.

Increasingly coming on line at Ly-Con is a small shop dedicated to servicing engine cases. This is unique for an engine builder because, as long as anyone can remember, case align boring has been the private domain of Nixon on the West Coast and, especially, Divco, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But now Ly-Con has purchased its own align boring machine, along with a smaller CNC center and repurposed mills for various supporting tasks, allowing full servicing of engine crankcases for its in-house needs (no one in Visalia is out to corner the market on case rebuilding). This case shop is still new and developing its working protocols, but it’s primarily designed to give Ly-Con more control over this critical aspect of engine building and hopefully a small gain in profit margin eventually.

The latest gizmo is a laser welder in the welding shop. Barely unpacked during our visit, the welder promises to allow heretofore impossible aluminum repairs, but that’s something still theoretical. Like many of the ideas Ly-Con has brought to fruition as FAA-approved processes, laser welding is something the Visalia team will practice with on scrap parts, and if those work, it will move to dyno testing, followed by use on experimental engines run by trusted customers willing to try something new.

Applying for a process approval for certified engines remains well in the future, assuming it even works and makes business sense. If it doesn’t, it won’t be the first time what sounded like a great idea didn’t pan out.

Basics First

While Ly-Con is well known for its innovation and performance successes, sometimes Ken Tunnell laments the shop is perceived as something out of left field, a place for wild experimental engines, when the reality is its livelihood is dependable daily driver overhauls, inspections, IRANs, prop strikes, and all the other work found in the certified world. It’s understandable as racing garners much publicity—and hardly any income considering the work and sponsorships involved—while the certified overhauls are the true work but take place in relative obscurity.

In reality the performance and certified work is complementary. Racing has improved the breed, the lessons learned around the pylons or in front of the airshow crowds inevitably finding good employment in the certified world. Ultimately building great performance engines—and daily drivers—is all about making the flat parts really flat and the round parts really round. There are no secrets, just a will to best understand the engine’s needs and a near slavish adherence to eliminating oversights through constant checking.

In the end that’s really what goes on at Ly-Con.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: Ly-Con Still Going Strong appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

From the Experimental/Amateur-Built category’s emergence in 1947 through the founding of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in 1953, the classification grew slowly—in part because building on your own meant doing everything: welding, working with fabric, painting, upholstering, wiring, and plumbing. Once you’d found all the raw materials you needed, of course.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the idea of “kit” airplanes became a serious thing. Frank Christensen is often credited for kick-starting the industry as we know it, providing builders of his Christen Eagle virtually everything they needed to build the airframe. All carefully packaged. All accounted for and tested to work with his airplane. No more cut-and-try, no more scrounging for a set of brakes that might work—or only work with serious modification. For a large part of that project, the parts fit together, turning what had often been a lot of hand fabrication into much more of an assembly process. Then came Burt Rutan and his moldless-fiberglass machines, first the VariEze and then the Long-EZ—to be followed by dozens of similar airplanes that promised greatly reduced build times alongside their impressive performance credentials.

• READ MORE: Ultimate Issue: Are You the One for That First Flight?

By the 1980s, the speed race was on, with Glasair and Lancair battling it out to make the fastest sport airplanes available. They hewed to a simple idea: Put as much horsepower into as small an airframe as you could get away with. Impressive top speeds came, but the real impact was actually behind the scenes. As the designs got faster, they had to become much stronger. Early homebuilts pulled from a rich tapestry of Piper Cub-like airplanes (along with the Cub itself, naturally), where speeds were necessarily low, aerodynamics comparatively forgiving, and the horsepower count was mostly what you could afford.

When the engineering requirements increased for the “average” homebuilt, so did expectations of what the kit would encompass. Early designs anticipated that you’d be able to weld your own fuselage tubes, engine mount, and exhaust system, for example.

From the late 1970s and into the next two decades, builder expectations changed radically. Every new kit was designed to be easier to build, either because the design itself was simpler, or because more of the tedious work had been done at the factory. In time, every flight-critical component would come to be built by professionals, either at the factory proper or by trusted subcontractors. They, as pros, used the right tooling and had the expertise to ensure that the parts were accurately built, typically to a much higher standard than the typical builder could muster.

• READ MORE: Latest CubCrafters Design Looks Back and Ahead

Which brings us to the opening question: Why aren’t there new kit companies popping up left and right, like we had in the latter part of the ’70s and through the ’80s? It’s a simple question with a multipart answer.

Let’s start with builder expectations. For the last three decades, experimental aviation has been in its maturity phase. The best-run and -funded companies chose to incrementally develop their products while working to build better factories. Investment in new tooling technologies, including CNC (computer numerically controlled) machining and, especially, punch-press machines, helped drive almost unseen development. If you look at, say, an early Van’s RV-6 and then consider a recent-build RV-7, you might conclude they’re very similar airplanes.

They’re not. The early RV-6 required a lot more fabrication by the builder and had, by modern standards, fewer semi-finished components. Meaning, the builder was responsible for a great deal of both assembly and alignment because of the need to locate parts relative to one another and drill holes in exactly the right place. Moving on to the current version, which uses something called matched-hole construction, the job gets significantly easier because the parts become self-aligning. Each mating part has the rivet holes placed in such a way that they only go together one way. You’re either way off or right on.

Even with that, though, the earlier versions required the builder to partially assemble large parts of the airplane, drill those locating holes to final size, then disassemble to remove burrs from the drilling process, primer between skins, and commit a few other steps before the parts could be reassembled and then riveted. Today’s technology involves the factory making those holes to final size, meaning that no further drilling operations are required. Assemble the pieces, make sure the surfaces align properly and there are no burrs or defects with the holes, then begin riveting. Removing builder steps helps cut the assembly time and reduces the chances of a mistake. And while it’s true the factory can make mistakes, it’s far more likely any “oops” will come from the builder’s hand.

These time-saving steps cost money for the builder but especially for the company. And they’re really not optional in today’s kit world. Builders expect a high level of completion and that every effort be made to reduce  both build time and the chances for builder error.

I asked this question of a handful of kit companies: Let’s say a tornado came through on a weekend and leveled your plant, what would it take to start again? The answer: between $5 million and $15 million. And that’s assuming you have your design and other intellectual properties already in place. Start the whole effort from zero? Perhaps double, according to my sources.

There’s more keeping this industry in the mature phase than pure economics. In the early days, there was a lot more tolerance for building one-offs and taking risks with startup companies. But those heady days were punctuated by a few marginal companies taking deposits and going under before all the kits or aircraft components were delivered. Some of these companies, trying to elbow their way to the front, found themselves unable to commit the kind of arduous, expensive development process all really good airplanes require. Not that they were dangerous, necessarily, but in many cases the last few clicks of refinement didn’t happen, at least not right away.

As a result, builders became more conservative over time, favoring the established companies that seemed to perform the development work and proved to have the financial grounding to continue producing kit components in a reasonable amount of time. They were also trending toward being followers rather than pioneers, in the sense that choosing a popular make and model gave them a built-in support group at the airport. That’s how the most popular brands became the default choice, making it harder for new entrants to gain a foothold.

• READ MORE: Van’s Aircraft Announces Recovery Plan

Cost is also a factor. Established companies have the advantage of amortizing the cost of the factory, which puts less of a burden on today’s kit prices. In fact, most kits have gone up in price mainly due to increases in the cost of raw materials. And that’s before you look at powerplant and avionics price increases. The kit market has always been price sensitive, so a company that has a stable product line with moderate costs, plenty of happy builders, support groups, and numerous flying examples has an unfair advantage over the newcomers.

But change is coming with the expansion of 3D printing and other new manufacturing techniques. Not that airplanes will, in the near future, be 3D-printed appliances, but that the technology allows for faster prototyping and the possibility of better, more accurate, more easily changeable molds for composite aircraft. (Traditional molds are intensely time consuming to create, which is why companies try to get the most out of them by not changing or updating models any more often than they have to.) And we’re not even considering the possibility of electric aircraft or other powerplant alternatives.

We may look back on this period of homebuilt aircraft as a decades-long time of stability and conventionality, but it’s not for a lack of imagination or wonder. Today’s Experimentals are the product of mature, relatively conservative companies providing the market precisely what it wants.

Tomorrow? Good question.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: It’s Time to Air Out the Kit Question appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Virgil Irwin, a Bearhawk 5 builder himself, has taken over for longtime owner Mark Goldberg. Generally speaking, it will be business as usual for the company, which has a manufacturing facility in Mexico. Irwin has moved other aspects of kit production from Texas to Fairview, Oklahoma, about 75 miles northwest of Oklahoma City.

Why the change? Goldberg said that “after turning 70 years old 20 months ago, I began to think it was time to let someone younger take charge of the company.”

Irwin, a builder, was no stranger to Goldberg and Bearhawk.

“At the time, I was in search of a utility airplane that could serve overseas in a remote environment,” Irwin said. “I needed true off-airport capability with great cross-country performance.”

He would be the first kit customer of the six-place Model 5. That airplane would eventually be shown at EAA AirVenture 2023 and then began some discussions about the company itself. Irwin, a serial entrepreneur since his late teens, wondered if Goldberg was ready to retire at about the same time Goldberg was thinking that very thing.

Goldberg is clearly excited about this new challenge and hugely complementary of the work designer Bob Barrows and Goldberg did. In particular, Irwin has praise for the Mexico facility, saying it’s clean and efficient and, perhaps most important, has many longtime employees as well as a steady stream of those wanting to join. It’s located near a Volkswagen manufacturing facility but it’s not hard to compete for the workers.

“We pay them well and they have a real sense of belonging,” Irwin said.

For the short term, Irwin is concentrating on updating the kits surrounding the Model 5, the company’s largest offering and likely to be the most popular overall.

“We’re going to update the kits,” he said, “and begin providing the kind of support modern builders look for.”

In particular, the new Bearhawk will work on things simple (like a complete landing-light kit for the Model 5) and complex (like a comprehensive firewall-forward package). Irwin acknowledges that the airplane is terrific, but some aspects of the kitting are a bit behind the times, and it’s his intention to close that gap as quickly as possible.

The goal is to build 40 kits this year as well as building out subkits and increasing the standard content level for the Model 5, planning for in-shop builder assistance and even prefabricated avionics panels. Along with a new FWF package, Irwin said he’s looking into revised cowlings that may improve cooling and provide a bit more speed. Irwin also said kit prices are likely to increase with the new content, but he’ll honor existing purchase agreements on all kits.

Once he feels that the Model 5 kit is thoroughly updated, he’ll begin working through the rest of the catalog, which includes four other models from the LSA to the four-seat Model 4.

“I am especially appreciative of all the new friends made during these 23 years,” Goldberg said in a statement. “This includes customers all over the world who are now friends, and vendors and others who have become much more than just business associates. I learned a tremendous amount from working with design engineer Bob Barrows whose engineering talent is just off the scale. My involvement with the company will continue as long as is needed to make the transition smooth and easy.”

More information can be found at www.bearhawkaircraft.com.

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

The post Bearhawk Aircraft Has a New Owner appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Van’s current challenges result from “a combination of significant events over a relatively short period of time [that have] increased costs, doubled normal inventory levels, slowed deliveries, and strained our cash flow to the breaking point,” the company says. It cites increases in manufacturing still evident from the COVID slowdown, an issue with primer used by a subcontractor in quickbuild components and the most recent problems with laser-cut parts, which were a response to help increase production capacity at a time when Van’s was experiencing historically high demand. Builders discovered that the laser-cut parts tended to crack during the dimpling process. “Although our testing proved that laser-cut parts are functionally equivalent to punched parts, belief among many builders is that they are unsuitable for use,” the company says. “This has resulted in an unmanageable number of requests to replace laser-cut parts and cancel orders. More than 1800 customers are currently affected by this issue, some of whom have received more than one kit.”

As part of the announcement, Van’s said that “starting today through mid-November, Van’s will be focused on assessing the internal changes necessary to address these issues. This means some of the typical day-to-day operations at Van’s will be affected while our team develops plans to correct the problem.”

Those changes include streamlining the company’s efforts to focus on replacing laser-cut parts for existing builders and reassessing its manufacturing processes. “During this period, shipments will be delayed, kit orders will not be processed, and refunds will not be issued,” the company says. “We will be unable to conduct factory tours and demo flights. We are adjusting our daily operating hours. Starting Monday, October 30th we will be open from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time each business day. Our builder technical support hours will shift to 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. and 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. each business day. This is a permanent change.”

In the background, Van’s has “assembled a small team of experienced advisors to assist us” from Hamstreet & Associates, a Portland, Oregon-based firm that “leads troubled companies through financial and operational crises, and delivers results.” That team includes interim CEO, Mikael Via, who had served Glasair Aviation in the early 2000s and developed the Two Weeks to Taxi builder-assist program. Hamstreet is expected to provide financial expertise as well as other interim officers to help Van’s move forward.

Builders and potential Van’s customers are likely to wonder about pricing and availability in the future. “Van’s Aircraft faces several challenges that require us to take time between now and mid-November to perform an internal assessment of our inventory, production, and shipping capabilities as well as overall operating efficiencies,” Van’s says. “During this time, we will be evaluating all reasonable means of satisfying builder concerns regarding laser-cut parts. At the same time, we will be reviewing the costing of our parts and kits.”

Van’s is expected to issue updates via its website in the near future.

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

The post Van’s Aircraft Announces Recovery Plan appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Lancair was a pioneer in composite construction and led the mainstreaming of the homebuilt movement through the latter part of the last century. It developed 14 designs and thousands of the speedy singles are flying all over the world. Founder Lance Niebauer sold the kit business in 2003 to build the certified Columbia line of aircraft, which was eventually bought by Cessna and ultimately dropped. Lancair become Evolution Aircraft in 2016 to concentrate on the pressurized turboprop model. It sold off older kit designs, and that business was purchased by JetEXE from Mark and Conrad Huffstatter, of Uvalde, Texas, who had hoped to revive the kit production but were concentrating on fleet support in recent years.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AVweb.com.

The post JetEXE Buys Lancair, Plans Sustainable Designs appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I first ran into Stefan Coetzee and KFA at Aero Friedrichshafen, my favorite light aircraft show in Europe. I was caught by the clever name. Easy to say, “KFA” sticks in your mind like a catchy tune.

Kitplanes For Africa sounds like a company making aircraft that should have superior bush capabilities. It was a handsome aircraft and I felt readers would enjoy it but they had no American representation at the time so I filed the discovery away under: “Promising.”

The bigger and more accurate picture is that KFA is yet another light aviation success story for South Africa*.

Almost half-way around the world, South Africa fell out of many conversations once the apartheid struggle finally ended in the 1990s. Yet despite years of ugly headlines, the country’s interest in aviation has been strong and building. Companies are producing lots of aircraft. (The Aircraft Factory alone produces 20 Sling aircraft each month, and has plans to increase to 30, employing almost 500 personnel.)

KFA was begun roughly when apartheid ended, so it shares no history with that difficult period. However, this timeline also illustrates the 30 years in business this builder has been active. More than 300 of their Bushbaby designs were sold and Coetzee reports strong business today.

Welcome to America…via Canada

An early enthusiast in the Americas was Canadian Vince Scott, a six-foot-eight tower of a man… and yes, he fits. Even his entry looked straightforward. For someone of my average stature, Safari XL looks huge inside. Coetzee enjoyed referring to “Hamburgers,” hinting at Yankee pilots who enjoy a good meal or three every day. Those well-fed pilots will love this enlarged bird. In fact, I think most pilots would look admiringly upon the large interior volume of Safari XL.

The gray-over-black Explorer looks familiar to Oshkosh attendees. I overheard more than one person say it “looks like a Kitfox.” This comment is not original or accurate because even Kitfox started out as a modification of an Avid Flyer, the true original of this planform by designer Dean Wilson 40 years ago. Many other variations on the theme have been developed over the decades.

Coetzee maintains that while similarities exist, Explorer is different in almost every element, “I don’t believe any part on this airplane would work on a Kitfox,” he said. Over several iterations — Bushbaby to Explorer to Safari to Safari XL — the design evolved like many do when engineers find a way to improve.

Safari XL has a particularly interesting story, one that I think many Americans will appreciate.

The XL model, made to fit tall Vince is six inches wider, almost two inches taller inside and about 15 inches longer. People who know about these numbers realize that those few added inches make for a significantly larger interior. Climb inside and it feels spacious. Bowed-out doors help (many aircraft use this technique) but Safari would feel large even with flat doors. Then, consider the luggage area.

Loading luggage into many aircraft is often an awkward hassle but KFA created a luggage door large enough for a good size suitcase. A couple sets of golf clubs would fit, noted Coetzee, and you can see in the image KFA has also accommodated lengthy fishing poles (arrow).

While Explorer fits the LSA description closely at 1,320 pounds gross, Safari XL bumps that up another 100 kilos to 1,543 pounds. Until 2025 when Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certificates (MOSAIC) throws open the door, Safari XL will come to the USA as a kit. Explorer has met German standards and could likely qualify for special light sport aircraft (SLSA) status but this work remains in the future. The good news is that KFA has long been a kit supplier, so they see supporting builders as a normal duty.

When MOSAIC finally arrives, Safari XL will easily qualify, even if equipped with an in-flight adjustable propeller. An even larger model is well into development, Coetzee hinted, so his company—like many in the light aircraft space — is gearing up for the added capabilities we are getting with MOSAIC…assuming the final rule looks much like the NPRM proposal we have been studying in recent days.

Even though Safari XL must be Experimental Amateur Built, KFA is happy to support different skill sets with a variety of kit packages. Beside the basic kit that may consume 700 hours, the company offers at least two levels that are commonly called quick-build kits.

Coetzee’s humorous reference to “hamburgers” brings home the fact that even if you and your best flying buddy may not be large fellows or gals, extra space inside is almost always appreciated (except maybe by the go-as-fast-as-possible crowd). If you are built large, this airplane will fit. Six-eight Vince looked comfortable when I asked him to model his plane for me.

Safari XL — and its slightly smaller Explorer sibling model — offer another interesting choice for pilots and brings to the market a design refined over many years.

ARTICLE LINKS:

• Kitplanes For Africa, contact info and content on this website
• Website for North American distributor Drake Aviation Adventures (website remains under construction at publishing time)
  • Until their Drake website is available, contact info appears here
• Complete kit description of KFA kits in PDF form

* Just off the top of my head, I can recall these manufacturers… The Airplane Factory (Sling), SkyReach (Bushcat), Bathawk, Rainbow, and now KFA plus a business in South Africa worked closely with Jabiru to build those aircraft. I’ll bet I missed a few. Not bad for a country of 60 million located a great distance from other established aviation development centers.

The post Kitplanes For Africa Bush Planes Are Big. Really Big. appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“Belvoir Media Group’s aviation portfolio complements our content-rich brands and will expand what we offer to readers, subscribers, and advertisers. Last quarter, we acquired Plane & Pilot Magazine and the LSA-focused website, ByDanJohnson.com, all with the goal of creating the deepest resource of general aviation content and information.” Craig Fuller, CEO of FLYING Media Group stated.

The Belvoir Media Group brands include:

AVweb.com is the largest independent aviation news site in the world, providing breaking news and information. AVweb.com has a remarkable ability to break stories. The editorial team of AVweb have their pulse on the industry and is unmatched in covering aviation news. 

Aviation Consumer is built to be the Consumer Reports of general aviation, providing editorialized product reviews for general aviation, ranging from aircraft, accessories, avionics, maintenance, and safety products. There is also a very robust used aircraft guide, which provides reviews of aircraft ranging from vintage to modern, all with an effort to empower buyers with unbiased information before their next purchase. Aviation Consumer comes in monthly print, as well as a database of decades worth of reviews. Next time you are thinking of buying an aviation product, ask “What Does Aviation Consumer Say?”

Aviation Safety is the premier safety-only aviation monthly magazine, with up-to-date reporting from accident investigators and safety counselors on real-life scenarios from pilots. With 40 years of archives and new reports every month, focusing on best practices and accident reconstruction, there is a massive library of content covering nearly every potential scenario that a pilot may encounter and many more they hope to never have. So much of being a successful pilot is centered around safety and decision-making, making Aviation Safety a must-read. 

KITPLANES is the Homebuilt Aircraft Authority, covering topics relevant to anyone who has ever dreamed of building or owning an experimental aircraft. The depth and detail of its coverage is unmatched in the aviation industry.

FLYING Media Group plans to preserve the heritage and unique voice of each of these publications, along with significantly increasing investments in content, reader experience, and digital sites. The plan will be to continue to offer the print versions of the publications and hope to introduce a bundled solution, where readers of all the FLYING Media Group properties can take advantage of the great library of content, across brands. 

FLYING Media Group plans to retain Belvoir’s aviation brands’ editorial staff and contributors.

FLYING Media Group (FMG) is the leading media portfolio in aviation. FMG brands include FLYING Magazine, Plane and Pilot, ByDanJohnson, Aircraft for Sale, Business Air, AVweb.com, Aviation Consumer, Aviation Safety, IFR Magazine, and KITPLANES.

The post FLYING Acquires 5 Major Aviation Media Brands appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Those challenges that impeded our progress toward the coveted pilot’s certificate might have seemed impenetrable, but when we look at what sport pilot Justin Falls of Lincolnton, North Carolina, has done to overcome his challenges in order to fly, just about anything we faced was, by comparison, absolutely nothing.

Falls was 18 years old when he broke his neck after falling off a fire escape, resulting in a spinal cord injury between his fourth and fifth vertebrae. Technically, he says this meant he was a quadriplegic due to motor and sensory deficits in all four of his extremities. Falls explains that the accident could have resulted in much more severe paralysis if his spine had been completely severed.

Today, he can move the fingers in his left hand, but his right hand is paralyzed, as well as his right triceps muscles and both his legs. A pharmacist at a hospital, Falls has used a wheelchair to get around for the past 15 years and drives a car with hand controls.

On the surface, this sort of major disability would appear to be a challenge that is too much to overcome for someone who wants to fly general aviation airplanes. But Falls had been interested in flying since he was very young, and he figured that if he could drive a car with only his hands, maybe he could fly airplanes as well.

“I lived about [a] half-mile from my local non-towered airport in Gastonia for most of my life,” Falls said, “and I especially enjoyed going to their airshows. I felt that aviation was a bit out-of-reach due to the expense, then after my injury, it was even further away. Since my car has hand controls, then I thought it should be possible to adapt a plane’s controls as well. Sure enough, there had been many people with disabilities like myself who have learned to fly in adapted planes. After I graduated from pharmacy school, one of the guys I played wheelchair rugby with was going to start training with Able Flight the next summer, and he is also quadriplegic. So I followed his progress and applied for an Able Flight scholarship about the same time I was applying for jobs as a new pharmacist.”

Flight Training for Student Pilots With Disabilities

Falls learned to fly through a scholarship provided by Able Flight, a non-profit organization that provides flight training and aviation career scholarships for people with disabilities. “Able Flight is funded by generous donors, philanthropists, and companies like Shell Aviation, Lockheed Martin, Tempest Aero Group, and many others,” Falls said. “I was able to learn to fly at no cost in the Sky Arrow, an Italian LSA. It is one of the few aircraft with a certified hand control design that can be flown using only your hands. The main limitation of the Sky Arrow is that it’s very difficult to transfer into it from a wheelchair, and it sits pilot and passenger tandem, with no extra room to stow a wheelchair.”

An Airplane of His Own

“I learned of Zenith when I was rolling around Oshkosh looking at all the different LSA kitplanes after I got my wings from the Able Flight awards ceremony,” Falls explains. “Sebastien, the owner of Zenith Aircraft, has been a supporter of Able Flight, and he is very inspired by their mission. I managed to talk him into selling me his CH 750 STOL and helping to design hand controls for it from scratch! His son Calvin was the lead designer, and the goal was to create a hand control setup for the Zenith that could also be used to train future Able Flight students.”

Falls added that the main reason he selected this make/model was that the high-wing design made it easier to transfer from a wheelchair into the cockpit and that the manufacturer was willing to help him with designing hand controls to fit his needs.

How Falls Flies His Zenith

The STOL CH 750 Falls flies has been modified so that the rudder, throttle, brakes, and push-to-talk are controlled from the left seat using a stick between his legs. Pushing forward on the rudder stick is right rudder, pulling back is left rudder. 

The electronic hat switch at the top of the stick is connected to a servo motor that controls the throttle. In the event of an electrical failure, he can still use the manual throttle on the panel as a backup. 

“The hand brake is like a motorcycle brake that replaces the toe brakes used during taxiing. I use my right hand to control the yoke in the center of the plane, and this controls the pitch and roll of the aircraft. It takes a lot of coordination and muscle memory to use these controls, but they are fairly intuitive once you’ve been doing it for a while,” Falls said.

Future Flights

Falls is planning a solo cross-country flight from the East Coast to the West Coast soon, and once completed, he’ll be the first quadriplegic to fly from the Atlantic to the Pacific solo. He plans to do it in his current airplane and will be having an autopilot installed to make the trip a bit easier. He, however, has even loftier goals.

“I would love to someday become the first quadriplegic to fly solo around the world, but that will require me to get my private pilot certificate,” Falls said. “I have thought about possibly modifying my plane with an extra fuel tank to make the journey around the world, if Zenith would be interested in helping to modify the plane. But ideally, it would be easier if I could cruise two to three times faster than I currently can. I sincerely hope that things will change to make it easier for people like me to fly bigger, faster aircraft. Getting a third-class medical will be an extra challenge, and if I fail, I would potentially lose my sport pilot privileges. There are so many limitations with LSAs that make it difficult to find planes that can accommodate a wheelchair.”

He would also like to become the first quadriplegic to go to space and asked if anyone has connections to Richard Branson, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos. “Tell them I need a ride!” Falls said.

For Justin Falls, flying gives him a sense of satisfaction, unlike any other activity he has done. 

“When I take off from the runway, I am no longer defined by anything else other than as a pilot. I have instant freedom to see the world from a vantage point that so few people get to enjoy, and I feel so privileged and lucky to be able to do it. And I rarely ever use the word ‘lucky’ to describe myself, because living with paralysis is hard, and I often feel very unlucky. But with flying, it’s different. I really am lucky to live in a time when humans can fly,” he said.

Videos and other content about Falls flying with his disability can be found on his social media channels by searching: “WheelieGoodPilot.” His Youtube channel, in particular, has videos showing exactly how Falls’ STOL Zenith CH 750 has been modified and how he flies it with hand controls.

The post A Major Disability Could Not Stop This Determined Sport Pilot appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

That was then, and this is now.

Today, while there are a few models priced to fly away for under a hundred grand, because of “feature creep” demanded by buyers that added full glass panels with autopilot, composite airframes, larger engines, ballistic parachute systems, and upgraded automobile-like interiors, prices for new light-sport airplanes can easily demand the low six figures.

There is—and has always been—hope for those new sport pilots who still want capable LSA models for pure recreational flying, without the price tag most modern LSAs carry. There is only one catch.

You need to build the airplane yourself.

If that last sentence scares the headset off of you because you question your mechanical aptitude to build an airplane, you are not alone. Many of us consider ourselves “good with tools” but run the other way when someone suggests assembling an experimental/amateur-built (E/AB) kit airplane.

Let’s take a look into the world of kit-built airplanes that qualify to be flown with a sport pilot certificate, and learn about the process from the biggest name in that market, Zenith Aircraft Company.

Focus on One Thing and Do It Very Well

When Sebastien Heintz, owner, and president of Zenith Aircraft decided to manufacture and market airplane kits in the U.S. in 1992, his family had already been designing and producing aircraft kits in Canada as Zenair Ltd. since 1974. Today, Zenith is the number one U.S. maker of sport-pilot-eligible E/AB kits, based on data from actual FAA registrations and information from Dan Johnson’s LSA database.

Once the FAA released its LSA regulations, Heintz saw an opening and made the decision to optimize their kits for recreational sport pilots and inexperienced first-time builders who had never built an airplane themselves. 

“Rather than developing fast, high-performance designs that required higher skills to build and safely operate,” Heintz said, “we instead focused on easy-to-fly slower designs better suited for lower-time weekend flyers. They needed airplanes with good slow flight handling characteristics, great visibility for both pilot and passenger, tricycle gear for better ground and crosswind handling, and lower insurance costs.”

With that in mind, Zenith developed E/AB kits that were both easy and quick to build, suitable for building in a garage or basement workshop and requiring just simple skills and tools. As a result of that focus, a “quick-build kit” is not required, although one is available which includes the fuselage section mainly assembled, ready for installation of the engine, avionics, and interior.

Cost Savings of Building Your Airplane

There is no question that building an airplane is a process that in some cases (and with some models) can take years. The cost can be spread out over this time, especially for more expensive components that are only needed toward the end of the project, such as the engine, avionics, and paint. Most E/AB builders buy component kits as they build, and Zenith builders can get the process started with the rudder starter kit for around $400. This allows builders to learn about the tools and skills needed to build a kit, while at the same time getting started on their kit project. 

As to cost, Heintz uses a “rule of thumb” that the kit cost is about one-third of the total project cost. 

“For example, a $20,000 kit will typically end up costing about $60,000 once the aircraft is completed and finished with a new engine, propeller, firewall-forward components, modern avionics, paint, and upholstery. Of course, this is just an indicator, and builders have a lot of control over the costs, which is one of the major advantages to building an E/AB airplane,” he said. 

Heintz added that decisions like the type of engine and avionics will have a major impact on the overall project cost, but that they give a builder a lot of control and the ability to truly custom-build their aircraft. In the end, he says, building your airplane offers potential cost savings typically about 50 percent over buying a factory-built new S-LSA.

When you use Heintz’s rule of thumb, this means that Zenith’s most expensive kit, the STOL CH 750 (kit price of $24,950), could end up costing about $74,840. Sure, your costs will vary if you choose steam gauges over a fancy glass panel, or spend big bucks on a premium custom paint scheme. But using the “three times kit cost” calculator gives an interested builder a pretty good idea of what their new E/AB airplane is going to cost once the FAA signs it off to go play in the sky.

Resources to Finish the Project

It’s no secret that with many kit airplane builds, life can get in the way and sideline a builder for any number of reasons. Zenith considers this by focusing heavily on manufacturing processes that result in quicker build times so a builder can stay motivated as they see their projects quickly come together. When a builder sees continuous forward progress, it increases the likelihood that the project will be completed.

With Zenith kits or any of the many other popular E/AB kits on the market such as the Van’s Aircraft RV-12, a builder is never alone. Zenith offers workshop classes before a builder gets started, allowing them to gain hands-on building experience at the Zenith factory to learn about the required skills, tools, and workshop space needed. This gives the builder a head start.

But once the project is off and running, there are many resources available to help a builder finish their aircraft. Each brand has active online builder communities ready to help each other with their projects, and by joining their local Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) chapter, builders can gain valuable information from those who have built and are currently flying kit airplanes.

One of the best resources for anyone interested in building an E/AB kit airplane is to attend EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The 2022 show will be July 25 through 31 and will give attendees access to all the major kitplane makers, along with numerous seminars, forums, and workshops on building an airplane.

MOSAIC May Open Up the Kit Airplane Market

Every manufacturer of E/AB airplane kits is maintaining an intense focus on the FAA’s coming Modernization Of Special Airworthiness Certification, a.k.a the MOSAIC rewrite. 

“We look forward to the MOSAIC rewrite as we believe it will indeed open up light sport to larger aircraft, as well as provide some needed updates for certification of E/AB aircraft rules,” said Heintz. “Zenith developed and introduced the larger STOL CH 750 Super Duty model partly in anticipation of the new rules.

“Also, Zenith has in the past produced larger four-seat aircraft kits, such as the STOL CH 801 sport utility airplane. Our larger non-LSA designs were put on the back burner with the advent of light sport/sport pilot, yet these can easily be put back into production as warranted by the MOSAIC rewrite. I anticipate that the current high fuel costs—as well as rising interest rates—will continue to make lighter and more fuel-efficient aircraft appealing to many builders and flyers in the foreseeable future,” Heintz concluded.

The post E/AB Kits Put the ‘Affordable’ in Affordable Sport Flying appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Work crews finished hauling away the largest of the rocks and muddy stumps only a few days ago, turning what had been a leafy hill behind the Just Aircraft factory in tiny Walhalla, South Carolina, into a rutted, scarred clearing barely the size of a football field. Even my host, company co-founder Troy Woodland, doesn’t condescend to calling this a runway. He banks steeply, turning short final in his lime-green and silver SuperSTOL kitplane, diving for the red-hued earth with what suddenly seems like questionable sanity.

“If this doesn’t make you a little nervous your first time out,” Woodland tells me over the intercom, “there’s probably something wrong with you.”

I’m not ashamed to admit it: I’m slightly nervous as the ground begins to rush all around us.

“But really,” he says, “you shouldn’t be nervous.”

He pours in a burst of power and smoothly pulls back on the stick. The SuperSTOL rises to follow the contour of the hill until Woodland abruptly chops the power. The world goes eerily quiet as the SuperSTOL announces it is finished flying—from a height of several feet and at a discomfortingly fast rate of descent we are falling. I brace for impact, but there is no bone-crushing arrival. Instead, the SuperSTOL’s nitrogen-charged shock absorbers and 29-inch tundra tires cushion the brunt of the abuse from our unorthodox landing. Woodland immediately gets on the brakes, glancing at me as we trundle over rocks and tree branches.

I am sitting in the left seat, grinning like an idiot.

This basic sequence is repeated perhaps two dozen times throughout the day as we drop into impossibly small parcels of land in and around Walhalla. Once firmly planted on the ground, Woodland wastes no time in putting his foot into the rudder to spin us back toward whence we’d come, applying full power and with effortless motions jabbing the stick forward for a brief instant and then wrenching it back while grasping the flap handle on the floor and raising it one notch. The combination of sudden forward momentum and additional lift from the flaps propels us into the air. We climb sharply. The airspeed indicator shows 35 miles per hour. The sensation is similar to being in a helicopter.

No other airplane I’ve flown can do what the SuperSTOL can. STOL, as you know, stands for “short takeoff and landing.” SuperSTOL, then, implies really short takeoffs and landings, made possible by the airplane’s huge 45-degree fowler flaps and self-deploying leading-edge slats, designs borrowed from the Helio Courier bush plane and scaled to fit this diminutive two-seat experimental amateur-built kitplane. The only vehicle I would confidently take on the mess of a surface we first landed on would be a farm tractor or a backhoe, I think to myself. Yet here we are in a rag-and-tube taildragger, lumbering over deep grooves, muddy furrows and jagged rocks as though it’s all perfectly normal.

Somehow, in this airplane, it is normal. By the end of the day I feel comfortable with everything we are doing. The nervousness has faded—and the reason is simple. The SuperSTOL lands at such slow speeds and has such a sturdy structure that, with each takeoff and landing, my confidence in the airplane’s incredible capabilities grows. What would have seemed unusual, in fact, would have been landing on an actual paved runway. Instead, Woodland and I drop into farm pastures, neighbors’ yards and steeply graded grass and mud fields bordered by trees, lakes and rivers underneath a 2,000-foot overcast lording over the smoky foothills of the Appalachians. What a way to spend a day.

Birth of the SuperSTOL

What’s truly amazing about this kitplane is that, if you have a few hundred feet of space in your yard and an extra $75,000 on hand [in 2014 dollars], you too can own this incredible airplane.

The world got its first glimpse of Just Aircraft’s SuperSTOL at Oshkosh in 2012, where it was an instant hit when Woodland and his business partner, Gary Schmitt, demonstrated the airplane in public for the first time. The SuperSTOL had actually been on the drawing board for close to 10 years. Woodland knew it was only a matter of time before he would build it. Just Aircraft had been selling a kitplane called the Highlander that offered many of the attributes Woodland saw as desirable for a personal bush plane, such as light weight, decent power, slow landing speed and available tundra tires. But to create the ultimate budget bush plane, changes were needed—radical changes.

The first modification Woodland designed for the SuperSTOL was its unique A-frame landing gear, a setup borrowed from the Pilatus Porter and further modified to incorporate shocks similar to those found on off-road trucks and ATVs. Next Woodland whipped up the engineering drawings for the SuperSTOL’s slats, which are designed to extend automatically any time the airspeed drops below 55 knots. As on other slat-equipped airplanes, they allow the wing to continue flying at a higher angle of attack and, in turn, a slower airspeed. In normal operations, Woodland says, the SuperSTOL’s tail actually stalls before the wing does—and it happens at an indicated airspeed of just 28 knots.

Woodland says he’s tried to get the airplane to spin but hasn’t succeeded yet. For the wing to stall, the SuperSTOL has to be at such a wild nose-up deck angle that he doesn’t try that very often either. The normal procedure for landing is to chop the power, hold the stick full aft and let the airplane drop, at 500 to 1,000 feet per minute, all the way to impact with the ground. There is no flare. There is no float. It’s the sort of abuse that would break most other airplanes. For the SuperSTOL, it’s routine.

Another key piece of the development effort was convincing Sensenich to develop a new 82-inch climb prop to pair with the SuperSTOL’s Rotax 912ULS engine. Woodland’s personal airplane, a self-described test mule, has a Kiev climb prop built in Ukraine and a big-bore kit for the engine that bumps horsepower from 100 to 110. The combination allowed us to get off the ground in about 100 feet on the shortest runs, though Woodland says he generally likes to use every foot of available takeoff space before hauling the SuperSTOL into the air. Some early SuperSTOL kit builders have opted for much larger engines, up to 200 hp, which should provide mind-blowing short-field performance, especially with the new Sensenich prop.

Even a SuperSTOL with the stock Rotax 912ULS engine has a published takeoff ground roll of just 275 feet at the airplane’s max gross weight of 1,320 pounds, the typical limit for LSAs. Another thoughtful design element is the airplane’s folding wing, which allows easy storage in a garage or shed. With the wings folded back, the SuperSTOL measures 21 feet, 8 inches long and just 8 feet, 6 inches wide. Landing ground roll is about 100 feet with help from the SuperSTOL’s big Matco disc brakes, meaning this truly can be a backyard airplane for a good number of people.

Still, it’s not the ideal choice for long-haul travel—or even medium-haul travel. Typical cruise speed with those big tires hanging in the breeze is a leisurely 87 knots. But with its 24-gallon gas tank and the Rotax’s economical fuel burn, endurance is exceptional. And in the air the SuperSTOL feels like a lot of LSAs we’ve flown. The controls demand a light touch, especially the ailerons. To keep the ball centered, it’s best to lead turns with the rudder, applying almost imperceptible input in the direction of the turn with the stick. I noted the airplane we flew rode a little nose-high in cruise, something Woodland said he’s working to tweak through adjustment of the horizontal stabilizer’s angle of incidence.

Carolina Bush Flying

Where the SuperSTOL shines brightest, of course, is during takeoff and landing. My introduction to the airplane came at Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland, Florida, this past spring. Woodland and I flew a customer’s airplane from Paradise City, the small grass runway reserved for ultralights, LSAs and small helicopters. We couldn’t leave the area due to a TFR blanketing the airport during the afternoon airshow, so we were stuck in the pattern, where the breezy crosswind had swung around to become a 10-knot tailwind. Even so, Woodland had the SuperSTOL down and stopped in about 100 feet. Even though the conditions weren’t ideal, the airplane intrigued me. I agreed to come to Walhalla for some real bush flying.

When I showed up at his door a couple of weeks later, Woodland delivered on his promise to show off the SuperSTOL’s unrivaled capabilities in its true elements. After we’d made several takeoffs and landings on the newly cleared strip behind the factory and on another grass runway running from a lake in a ravine to the top of the hill in front of the one-story concrete-block factory, we headed for the Tugaloo River on the border with Georgia, the site of our next improbable landing.

“I’d like to drop in and say hello to a friend,” Woodland said, setting up for final toward another hill with a thin cutout in the trees, atop which sat a white plantation-style mansion. The handsome home had black shutters and a grand entryway flanked by four tall columns. As we slowed for final, the slats deployed with a subtle clunk—it wasn’t really jarring, but no matter how many times it happened throughout the day, it was always a surprise to me.

Descending below the tree line, Woodland pulled the power and eased the stick back. The SuperSTOL dropped onto the lawn and rolled to a stop in the shadow of two enormous oak trees. He shut the engine down and we climbed out to greet the home’s owner, Chip Angel, who offered us handshakes and fresh-brewed coffee. As we chatted and began looking over the airplane, Troy and I noticed that we’d been flying around with a 5-foot-long tree branch entwined in the tailwheel. From the reddish color of the dried mud there was no doubt that we’d picked it up on a previous landing back at the Just Aircraft factory. Woodland gave the branch a good tug and tossed it aside — to the delight of Angel’s golden retriever, who joyfully snatched it with his teeth and bounded up onto the porch.

With the offending stick removed and our coffee cups emptied, we bid farewell to our host and climbed aboard the airplane, rocketing back into the sky and banking sharply for home. After several more takeoffs and landings on the muddy hill, we shut down and headed inside the 32,000-square-foot factory for a closer look at the Just Aircraft operation. It was a surprisingly busy place, with dozens of workers and customers cranking wrenches.

Woodland and Schmitt founded Just Aircraft in 2002, starting out with a kitplane called the Escapade that’s reminiscent of a Kitfox. That airplane evolved into the Highlander, which quickly earned a reputation as a decent STOL performer. Still, Woodland knew that he and Schmitt could do better. Working from a pile of engineering drawings at home on his kitchen table, he started with the basic pre-welded steel frame from the Highlander and began incorporating all the touches that turned a fine STOL airplane into a SuperSTOL. The prototype was completed just days before the start of Oshkosh 2012.

After seeing the airplane in action, would-be customers began lining up asking when they could buy one. That set into motion plans for full-scale production of a kit, demand for which is exploding. Woodland said nearly 100 SuperSTOL kits have been shipped so far, and production is nearly sold out for the rest of this year. About 90 percent of all new orders are for the SuperSTOL versus the Highlander, Woodland said, despite the Highlander’s lower price.

Building the SuperSTOL

Only a handful of SuperSTOLs have been completed so far, but more are taking to the sky all the time. Build times are expected to average between 500 and 1,000 hours, which is typical of several other homebuilt models. The basic kit [in 2014 dollars] costs $36,650 and includes everything from the firewall back, save for the cockpit instruments. The base engine, prop and cowl add $27,000 to the total price, while the instrument panel can set a builder back anywhere from $5,000 to perhaps $15,000. To save money, Woodland said he pieced together his lime-green SuperSTOL using a rebuilt engine and used tires.

As for the true performance of the airplane, early SuperSTOL pilots are still in test-pilot territory. Woodland said it took him hours of flying the airplane with the flaps and slats extended before he truly began to appreciate just what the SuperSTOL can do in the air. With around 800 hours under his belt, he has a pretty good feel for its capabilities. Still, he said Just Aircraft plans to hire an independent flight-test company soon to really wring out the airplane and define the full performance envelope.

One thing is for certain: The SuperSTOL couldn’t achieve its performance goals without the clever technology Woodland has incorporated into the design, especially the slat design. What was a little unnerving about the slats to me is that they often deploy asymmetrically, with only one slat popping out initially followed a moment later by the other. It doesn’t really affect controllability, however, and when the slats are deployed for landing they stay out. Unlike the design of the Helio Courier, which has slats that slide out on tubes, the SuperSTOL’s slats pop in and out on short arms that fold flush against the wing at higher airspeeds. It’s an ingeniously simple setup that saves on weight, cost and complexity.

The SuperSTOL’s shock absorbers, meanwhile, are built in California by a company called Fox Factory Inc., a name well known to ATV and off-road enthusiasts. Woodland says the shocks, with 6 inches of suspension travel, were carefully tuned through trial and error to dampen them and allow for drop-in landings. The design works perfectly, with no chance of a bounced landing and little danger of a nose-over even with maximum braking. Proper transition training, of course, is an absolute must for pilots new to the SuperSTOL.

Visibility from the cockpit is superb, with all-Plexiglas doors and even a Plexiglas ceiling that lets in lots of natural light. The interior is roomy for an LSA, with plenty of elbow room and a large baggage area just behind the seats. Woodland said there’s no worrying about how much weight is loaded into the rear cargo area (as long as you stay under max gross, of course) and that the airplane flies better with some weight in the back.

The Verdict

As I toured the factory, finishing touches were being put on the first of two SuperSTOLs preparing to compete this year at the Valdez STOL competition in Alaska. While the SuperSTOL wasn’t intentionally designed for Valdez, it may as well have been. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future this airplane dominates the competition there — especially as Just Aircraft and clever builders incorporate further enhancements and refinements into the design.

The SuperSTOL isn’t for every pilot, but if what you crave is a go-anywhere bush plane that’s built like a tank — and you have the patience and mechanical aptitude to build your own airplane — there’s probably no better choice. The price is reasonable compared with most production LSAs, and there’s not another airplane out there that can do what the SuperSTOL can. Woodland said he likes to think of it as an aerial ATV. And really, that’s the perfect description. You can fly a SuperSTOL from your yard and head off on excursions and adventures that will introduce you to a side of aviation unlike what most other pilots will ever get to experience. Best of all, you’ll be having so much fun you won’t be able to wipe the grin off your face.

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