KITPLANES October 2024

IT’S EASY INSIDE a special-interest magazine like KITPLANES to work according to a few occasionally misguided assumptions. For example, I assume that you’re reading us because you have an interest in homebuilt aircraft—that much should be obvious to us all. And based on both formal and informal polling of our readership, I assume the vast majority of you are considering building an airplane, have built an airplane (sometimes more than one) or are flying an Experimental-registered airplane today. That’s the easy part. If you’re embedded in our culture, you know (or are rapidly learning) the language. Sometimes it gets a little obscure and it ends up, awkwardly, coloring normal conversation. “He cooked that steak like bucking the inboard flange rivet on an RV-3 tail.” “Her tennis serve is smoother than…

BACK WHEN WE LIVED IN TEXAS, we took a trip to visit family in Minnesota from our base near Houston. Louise had taken the RV-6 to Pensacola recently, so it was the RV-8’s turn for a cross-country trip. Besides, Louise hadn’t flown the Val for a number of months and wanted to get current again, so we filled it up and got ready to depart at dawn on a Thursday. We planned the normal two-hop trip with a fuel stop in the Kansas City area. The weather looked, well, interesting. As usual. We had been watching the seven-day forecast charts for several days and the predictions were for an area of significant thundershowers across Iowa. It looked good to the west, however, and it was clear south of KC, so…

BACK WHEN I FLEW the original Sling High Wing, I was impressed with the design, the handling and the overall airframe. It was a nice job overall by Sling. The same could be said for its low-wing brother, the TSi. When I flew the four-seat TSi with the Rotax 915 iS, the performance impressed—with four adults, full fuel and a density altitude of over 9500 feet, it climbed away from the mountain runway at Big Bear Lake, California, at over 500 fpm! The turbo made the difference even as the maximum power from the 915 was fairly modest. The High Wing was different. Perhaps because it sports more frontal area than the TSi by the nature of the wing/fuselage intersection—remember that the wing is exactly the same, just on top instead…

Aside from a different cowling, it’s hard to tell the differences between the 915- and 916-powered Slings, so we asked Sling’s Ed Hefter to bring us up to date on what actually changes with the new engine. Q: Are there any airframe differences? A: There are some minor airframe differences between the TSi with the 915 iS and the 916 iS engine, but not many. The engine mount has been beefed up to handle the extra torque for the first few minutes of takeoff. The cowling has changed to get more airflow into the intercooler for the 916 iS. The throttle quadrant has been changed to allow for a manual prop control lever since people getting their props right now are generally going for the MT prop. If a person…

Rotax introduced the 160-hp 916 iS two years ago with relatively few technical details beyond that it made more power than the 915 iS. Anyone with eyes could tell that it shared a lot with the 915 and the other 900-series engines, being a small-displacement opposed-four with two valves per cylinder, one central camshaft, gear reduction drive, liquid-cooled heads and a dry-sump oiling system. Recently, Rotax has been offering tech presentations on the 916 with some additional details—including that Rotax is delivering upward of 5000 engines a year worldwide. Here are a few of them. Rotax has been delivering what’s called Version 3 engines, which are capable of using a hydraulic prop governor for constant-speed applications, as well as Version 2, meant to use fixed-pitch props. Rotax does strongly encourage…

“I MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO BUY AN AIRPLANE…BUT MAYBE I CAN BUILD ONE!”—DALE STANLEY BACK IN 1976, Dale Stanley was a teen-ager when he purchased one-fifth of an Aeronca Champ, along with his parents and brother. They all took flying lessons in the Champ; the fifth partner was a family friend who was already a pilot. “I soloed in that Champ, but I didn’t have any aspirations of ever flying as much as I have,” said Dale. “I wasn’t brought up with the idea that you can achieve much because economically it wasn’t within reach.” Turning Point Nevertheless, Dale’s passion for aviation was growing, and the only thing that matched it was his passion for that family friend’s daughter, Denise. Soon after Dale and Denise were married, her “surrogate”…