JetEXE Aviation has bought Lancair International and has big plans for the historic kitplane company. The Sacramento-based MRO, training and charter business’s owner says that for now the focus will be on keeping up support for the existing fleet, but there’s a plan for the iconic brand. “New designs, expansion and moving to new facilities would follow this year,” Capt. Augustine Joseph told AVweb. “We plan to bring out new and advanced designs and also focus on designs that incorporate sustainable energy technologies both in manufacturing and in our products.”
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.
Who owns JetEXE?
MRO?
Maintenance, repair, overhaul
Did you really mean “last century”?
He did. We are nearly a quarter of the way into the present 21st century. Makes you feel young, doesn’t it? ’23 no longer means 1923. Lanceair started out 43 years ago.
Remember 1970? Closer to 1923 than 2023. Oh my aching knee.
I see your knee, and raise you a shoulder.
Accident rate for Lancair aircraft is approximately 20 fatal accidents per 100000 flight hours. The rest of General Aviation has a fatal accident rate of about .6 per 100000 flight hours.
That .6 seems out of line. The 172 has always hovered around 1.0. Where did you get that number?
WOW……..I knew Lancair… back in the 80’s at SZP, that’s incredible they grew the company so large and have now sold it. Good for them.
This is great news. When the Huffstatter’s purchased Lanceair, they completely mismanaged all the parts being moved and much corporate knowledge was lost resulting in extremely poor product support of the Lanceair line. Hopefully the new ownership will be a good thing.