Experimentals

Paul Bertorelli recently sat down with Jeff Chamberlain from the Argonne National Laboratory as part of his research for an in-depth comparison of battery technologies for our sister publicationAviation Consumer. Chamberlain had a lot to say about the future of battery technology and its impact on the push toward electric airplanes. Read more here. Duration: […]

Every show we cover seems to feature one airplane that’s the crowd magnet and at this week’s Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring, it’s the Commuter Craft Innovator. This airplane is a canard design vaguely reminiscent of the Long-EZ but with aspirations to be both an experimental amateur built and, eventually, an LSA. Although mock-ups of […]

“Affordable aircraft” are what the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo is touting in its tagline this year, and we’ve found one: the $34,000 Merlin PSA, which Aeromarine LSA debuted at the show. Chip Erwin shows us around the eminently affordable experimental in this video,and you canread more here. view on YouTube

“I’m shopping for insurance.” We hear this phrase all the time, but what does it really mean when it comes to protecting your plane—whether it’s still in hundreds of pieces or it has hundreds of hours in the air? It’s not like you’ll be taking a trip to the airplane mall and comparing makes, models, […]

Flying an RV-8 from Los Angeles, California to Oxfordshire, England in 19 days may strike many as an adventure of a lifetime. For me, the 7000 NM trip was my way to return home after working four years in the Tesla Motors Design Studio in Hawthorne, California. Airfields along the Crimson Route, partially developed in […]

Hi, my name is Bill and I’m a toolaholic… Very few aircraft builders are not tool hounds. These are the people who walk through the local tool stores with a glazed look in their eyes. They are thankful when their spouse gives them a wrench for a present, even if they already have 12 identical […]

A team headed by NASA engineer Mark Moore plans to fly a modified Tecnam P2006T driven by an array of small propellers powered by electric batteries. Moore explains to AVweb’s Mary Grady how this project could completely upend the design rules for GA aircraft of the future. Duration: 5:34 File Size: 6.4 MB download here

The structure of an airplane and its systems are only as strong and reliable as the joints holding its components together. The strength of a joint is dependent not only on the properties of the fasteners, but on the design of the joint itself. The way the fasteners are loaded, the strength of the parts […]

Houston was only an hour behind us, but the weather was turning out much worse than forecast. The ceilings were steadily lowering and the METAR updates said the few airports along our route were going from marginal to worse. A pop-up IFR clearance would have been great, but there was a little problem: the airplane […]

Kitplanes magazine editor Paul Dye is a former NASA flight director, but he’s also a passionate homebuilder, currently working on a Dream Tundra. At AirVenture 2015, he gave us his six top reasons for joining the homebuilt community. view on YouTube