Carbon Fiber Ultralight Airplane Wing Kit

I've often wished we had a good photo illustration of what is contained in our wing kits.  Today, we finally took the picture.

Shown below is a wing kit complete with carbon fiber spars.  The kit with aluminum spars is identical in almost all respects. 

The wing kit has everything except glue, fabric and paint.  In a future post, I'll run through the list of contents in this kit.

With aluminum spars, this kit costs $1430.

With carbon fiber spars (as pictured), this kit costs $3630.

A complete description, with many, many pictures, of how to build a wing from this kit is included in this link.

And here is the photo of the wing kit:

Hirth F23 twin has a redundant cylinder

After reading this, some of you will shoot me down.  It's OK -- I'm vowing to share what I know, no matter how embarrassing.

On this two cylinder engine, one cylinder is optional.

It seems like months ago -- but in fact, it was only two weeks ago:  we had two days of glorious weather.

Our airport was alive with activity.  72 degree high temperatures (in January) brought out one helicopter, some gliders, along with their towplane, our ultralight, and a buzzing crowd of powered paragliders.

My crew was working hard on getting another plane ready for delivery; we'd just swapped a brand new F23 Hirth twin boxer into one of our Belites.  (This particular plane is headed down to Texas and Florida to be a dealer demonstrator on floats... stuff for another post...)  The F23 had already been running for a couple of hours, as we slowly cranked up the power and prepared the engine for first flight.

(Another person was performing the extended runup).

I did a careful preflight, ensuring that everything was OK.  The airframe had already flown, (briefly), but it would be a first flight for this particular brand new engine.

The electric start on the engine kicked it to life very easily.  A check on the 4 point safety harness, and I taxiied out to the active.

A quick runup, and I was accelerating down the runway -- albeit slowly.  I shut it down and taxied back to the hangar.  Realizing that power was low, I quickly (and incorrectly) concluded that the propeller had the wrong pitch.  I had Gene fetch another with a better bite from our inventory of props, and a few minutes later it was torqued down and ready to go.

I taxied out again.  I applied full throttle, and the engine powered up smoothly.   Something was still wrong; RPM was quite low (at 800 RPM below full power); but the bird still wanted to fly, and I did to.  So I let it take off.

I made a couple of circuits of the field, enjoying the perfect weather, and also enjoying harassing the powered paragliders that were hanging around the east end of the pattern.  I sure wasn't happy with the power, though - it just didn't have nearly the snap I'd come to expect from our F33 installations in our Superlite models.

I landed the bird and taxied in.  As the bird rolled to a stop, I told Gene I still thought we had a real problem with the engine.

He pulled the top off each carburetor in turn, inspecting the linkage.

Well, it turns out one of the ball swages on the twin carburetor cables had failed (they'd passed a pull test in the vise!) and one of the two carbs wasn't advancing past idle.

So I'd been flying with one cylinder.  With a F23 Hirth, the second cylinder is not necessary for a good flight.

Wiring an ultralight instrument panel into an Ultralight Aircraft

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Let's wire up an instrument panel, using Belite' featherweight avionics.  Our completed panel will weigh about 12 ounces (0.35KG), and it will look like this:

That's a lot of functionality.

Anyway, let's build it.  We're starting with our precision machined aluminum panel,

Belite formally introduces UK SSDR ultralight aircraft

We've just announced a UK aircraft:  A "SSDR".

Hi res photos can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/beliteaircraft/ where you can see a new set  of photos labeled SSDR
 
The website has a lot of information, www.beliteaircraft.com


And here's some additional comments from James:

The plane that we produce weighs less than 101KG, and the wing area is 10.1 square meters.  It comes with the following features:


* Carbon Fiber wing spars
* Aluminium internal ribs
* ChromAlloy steel fuselage -- the operator is surrounded by super strong 4130 aircraft steel, helping protect significantly in the event of an accident
* Very basic instrumentation:  Airspeed Indicator;  Engine EGT/CHT; Engine kill switch
* 28HP engine with wood prop (pull start)
* 5" Wheels with lightweight tyres
* Full windshield
* Enhanced wing span -- 26' 2"

We have a price (available for a limited amount period of time) of £15000, FOB Wichita, KS.

The plane, as delivered, has a 5 gallon gas tank.  In addition to being a legal SSDR, this makes it legal as a US FAR Part 103 Ultralight Aircraft as well, which aids our flight test procedures.  The tank capacity may be increased to a larger size, after delivery to England, at the option of the buyer, as long as weight limitations are observed.

The plane is light as a feather and very maneuverable.  It is a joy to fly.

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