Airborne at last (5)

I spent a very pleasant Saturday with Maule recently. They're amongst the nicest people you could hope to find in General Aviation and their Moultrie Georgia factory has a very family feel about it.

I took the oportunity to fly their soon-to-be-certificated M9 - basically an M7 with an increased MAUW and a 230hp Jet A burning SMA engine up front. As you would expect, the aeroplane retains Maule's STOL qualities and combines it with a decent 130kt cruise (it also retains Maule's handling, which doesn't quite lead the industry). At this speed you'll be burning about 8.5usg/hr. With UK avgas prices starting to hit and exceed £2 per litre, and with 100LL becoming extremely hard to find in some parts of the world, this ($275,000) aircraft looks like being a well-deserved winner for Maule.

Airborne at last (3 and 4)

With the dull grey skies of the UK many thousands of miles away, it's time for something a bit different. On the runway behind Jack Brown's Seaplane Base sits the German-registered amphibian that I'm about to fly. The Dornier can be configured to carry nine passengers and is powered by a couple of PT6s on top of the wing. These put out 1,300shp between them.

This being Florida, we take off and head for a local lake for some water landings and water handling. It's (obviously) huge fun and the combination of the hull and the power make taxying on the step easy and stable. The aeroplane is both EASA and FAA certificated and is yours for a smidge over $6m. The company has 39 orders, but (for now at least) no factory in which to build them. Watch this space.

The Dornier attracted a fair bit of attention from a couple of amphibian AirCam pilots, and before I had time to say 'pump out the floats' I was sitting in the back of one of their aeroplanes and heading for the runway. We took off and I flew a few landings on some local lakes - the speeds and distances are hugely different, but then the AirCam 'only' has 200hp (2 x Rotax 912ULS) and 'only' costs $100k for the kit (without floats). Water handling is a bit different and thanks to my inability to get us onto the step quickly enough, we got a bit of a soaking from the spray.

Both aircraft are huge fun, both are interesting, and both are less than entirely practical for the UK, but if I lived in Florida I'd be checking my bank balance, and once I'd confirmed that as nearly empty, I'd be looking for a share in an AirCam.

Airborne at last (2)

…and it just gets better and better. Minutes after landing in the Mirage we were climbing into a new Meridian. If the Mirage is impressive, the Meridian is even better (and of course more expensive).

There are quite a lot of airframe changes, and although the standard six-seat fuselage plug remains the same, the wing has been modified quite a bit. The empennage has also been strengthened which does make me wonder about the non-strengthened JetProp, although it has to be said that they're not falling out of the sky.

If you don't think about it too deeply, operating the Meridian out of the UK should be fairly reasonable - at least in terms of fuel costs. Now, where can I get my hands on a JetProp for comparison?

Airborne at last (1)

A while ago I mentioned that I hadn't flown for a while. I'm happy to say that the situaton has now been corrected. After Piper's LSA announcement, there was a scramble amongst US journos to fly the PiperSport. Now, I have nothing against it, but having flown a couple of SportCruisers(exactly the same aeroplane apart from the paint scheme and name) I felt no compunction to join that particular scrum.

As luck would have it, Bart Jones, Piper's chief pilot and a new Mirage both happened to be in the same place at the same time, so I jumped in with Bart and FLYER's Rod Simpson and went flying. The Mirage is a pressurised six-seater that's powered by a 350hp turbocharged Lycoming. Inside, there's lots of leather in the back and a three-screen Garmin G1000 in the front. It's built to climb to cruise altitude and sit there until the time comes to descend for landing. It's not a bimbling machine and it isn't cheap to run, but it does what it does very well indeed. More details of this and other Pipers in a future edition of the mag... but in the meantime, it feels bloody good to fly again.

Piper gets sporty

A couple of years ago I had a long chat with Piper's now ex-CEO, Jim Bass. He explained how Piper's fortune (and in General Aviation fortune is interchangeable with survival) was pretty much based on the six-seat fuselage that is the Matrix, Mirage and Meridian. He couldn't quite bring himself to say it out loud, but the four-seat, single-engine line was, well, a little tired. Jim's view of Piper's future didn't include a whole lot of four-seater business.

Skip forward a couple of years. Jim Bass has gone and Kevin Gould now sits in the left-hand seat at Piper. Last summer, Gould announced that the Warrior would be relaunched with a glass cockpit and leather interior and now he's telling the world that Piper is entering the LSA market. Unlike Cessna, Piper hasn't developed its own aeroplane, but has instead reached an exclusive distribution arrangement with Czech Sport Aircraft. The SportCruiser is no more; in its place is the PiperSport.

With Piper and Cessna both selling LSAs, the sector is maturing nicely - who knows, perhaps even Cirrus Aircraft will relaunch the SRS, a project they put on a distant back-burner over a year ago.

Still grounded

I daren't look at my logbook - I probably haven't flown the C182 for three or more months and that's not good for me or the aeroplane. I'm about to head out to the US for a while, but it's more of a road trip than a flying trip. We're taking our flight training exhibitions to the US, so I'll be heading from the LSA show in Sebring, Florida to JFK over a three week period and visiting lots of people on the way. With a bit of luck, I'll get to do a little flying in there somewhere.

Hello 2010

Thanks to a decent cold I'm drinking in the New Year with Lemsip rather than Champagne, but that's fine by me. So welcome 2010, and good riddance to 2009. There were of course some high points - flying to Tunisia, a couple of good trips to the USA and some other bits and pieces, but the continued tough economic times has brought continuing challenges to many in GA.