Ultralight Aircraft Kit - Hawk Ultralights have been around since 1982 when the single place classic model scored 3 prestigious awards in its first year of production and went on to scoop up many more. The outstanding new design winner from the 1982 EAA International Air Show earned that title with high scores for appearance, design, engineering, flying performance and portability.
It was the first fully enclosed ultralight on the market and has become a time-honored classic. How Sonex does this is really through simplicity of design. They're all-metal airplanes with blind pull rivets and straightforward systems.
Ultralight Aircraft Kit
On the Sonex-B, you can choose several engines, including the AeroVee 80- and 100-hp Turbo variants, the Jabiru 3300, ULPower's UL260 or UL350 or the Rotax 912. The AeroVee is the value leader at $7600 for the 80-hp
Cgs Hawk Arrow Ii
version. For the Sonex-B, cruise speed at 8000 feet is given as 150 mph with the AeroVee, or 20 mph greater with the 120-hp Jabiru 3300. Empty weight will vary with equipment, of course, but the Sonex-B should give you
between 480 and 530 pounds of useful load, depending on the engine; the 120-hp engine allows an 1150-pound max gross. We've chosen the two-seat RV-4 here because, well, it's a sentimental favorite. One of the purest flying airplanes ever made, it's an intrinsically simple design that by its size and nature seems to encourage builders to keep it that way.
Where the similarly tandem RV-8 tends to end up more complex—more powerful, faster, heavier and costlier—the RV-4 seems perfectly happy in its role as a fly-for-fun design. Perfectly content with 150-160 hp, the RV-4 is amazingly efficient, doing better than 200 mph on fuel flows that mean 32 gallons of fuel is generous, not stingy.
Like most mature kits, there are many options. You can add to the standard fuel capacity of 44 gallons (up to 58), change from the Cub-style gear to a spring-gear style and change from flaperons to split flaps/ailerons.
Top Single Place Ultralight Aircraft
Go wild, eh? Single place ultralights have just one seat for you - the pilot. To qualify as an ultralight, your prospective aircraft must meet certain weight requirements. To fly under FAA Ultralight Rules (FAR Part 103), the single seat aircraft must be used for recreational flights and have an empty weight of less than 254 pounds.
Training for pilots operating under FAR Part 103 is self-regulated and you need not obtain an FAA pilot certification. The Air-Bike (Airbike) is back and produced again in the USA! J L A is now the US manufacturer of Air-Bike kits and parts for the overseas market.
These great aircraft are easy to build, simple to operate, and available... The second category of ultralight aircraft is two place or two seater. With a two-place ultralight, you can take a passenger along for the ride.
Just remember that with a two-place aircraft, you will be flying under GA Rules (Part 61 & 91). Performance reflects wing area and utility, meaning cruise is in the 120-125 mph range, with added horsepower adding most to the rate of climb and shortening the takeoff roll.
Jordan Lake Aero
Maximum gross weight is 2200 pounds with an empty weight around 1100. Here's another one where if you build it light you'll be rewarded with impressive carrying capacity. Standard fuel is 39 gallons, generous with an O-320 up front.
Handling is straightforward and very Piper-like. Wag-Aero allows you to choose among various options, like a fully welded or merely tack-welded fuselage frame, so if you have the skills to complete that part of the project, you can put more of your budget elsewhere.
Go to a small local airfield and check around. There are computer ground school software that should bring you up to speed for the book learning but you will need to get instruction in flying at least in something similar that you wish to build.
Tail draggers are planes like the J3 and Champ of bygone years. Then there are the Cessna 150 types. Tricycle gear is much different than learning on a tail dragger. I did both and solo flew both gear types before 40 hrs.
Top Two Place Ultralight Aircraft
Three years ago, Sam Buchanan chronicled the build of an Airdrome Fokker, and his experience suggests these aircraft are really best aimed at those with previous building experience and the willingness to improvise as you go.
(Kind of like the roots of homebuilding, if you think about it.) There's a strong support group, but these are definitely not paint-by-numbers aircraft. As with Airdrome Airplanes, Fisher could well take over most of the spots on this list—at least 14 of the 17!
The two-place Dakota Hawk is one of those friendly, high-utility aircraft that's quite human sized; in fact, it's the largest of the Fisher designs. You get a wing of 128 square feet on an airplane with a gross weight of just 1150 pounds, which affords strong climb performance and short takeoff and landing rolls.
What you want in a utility design. Some of the company names you're familiar with may not be here—even some that show up in our aircraft directory as currently in production. For this story, we once again reached out to check on the health of the suppliers and found some of them to be unresponsive.
Jordan Lake Air-Bike Ls
That doesn't mean that they're gone—we were in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, after all—but what it does suggest is that extreme caution is warranted before starting a design supported by them. The unfortunate truth is that creating kits for homebuilt aircraft is rarely lucrative.
You may need a side business to support the fun side or, like Van's, Zenith and a few others, do it at a scale that is profitable. We're going to redouble our efforts to verify business conditions as we set about updating our kit guide for 2021. (Prices listed are current as of April 2020.)
If you're getting the sense that low-cost airplanes have fewer seats, you're catching on. The Sport Performance Aviation Panther is just such a solo endeavor, but it's not meant to be dull. Designed with handling manners that bring to mind gentleman aerobatics, the Panther combines good looks, fine handling and critical build elements meant to keep the cost down but the fun up.
Like an electric ultralight? There are motors out there. I see no point in solar panels on board, I suppose you might be able to squeeze out 5 more mins in an hour flight? Leave the panels on the ground
Kolb Mark Iii Xtra
The Baby Ace, a long-distance cousin of the original Corben designs of the late 1920s, is in many ways the quintessential early homebuilt. This parasol-wing, open-cockpit "flivver" mounts a Continental C-85 up front, although several variants of Continental's popular flat-four up to 120 hp will go, and provides a breezy 100-mph cruise.
Top speed is just 10 mph greater, but it probably feels like a lot more with the wind rushing by your ears. With a gross weight of just 950 pounds, the Baby Ace is LSA legal.
Three versions, the B, C and D are differentiated by landing-gear design and the shape of the tail. Getting your kit components under $25,000 for a one- or two-place airplane is a challenge enough, but getting something with four seats that starts in the budget basement (so to speak) is fairly impressive.
That's the Wag-Aero Sportsman 2+2. It's not a new design by any means, but a reproduction of Piper's PA-14 Family Cruiser aircraft. That means a basic tube-and-fabric design, taildragger configuration and some form of four-cylinder Lycoming up front;
Earthstar Gull
Wag-Aero says power from 125 to 200 hp will do. The narrow fuselage means that the rudder pedals are on the outside of the aircraft, giving the pilot the appearance of riding a motorcycle – hence the inspiration for the Air-Bike name.
Expect an inexpensive, easy to build and fun to fly aircraft. And last, you may notice some companies that we know are vital that are simply not represented. Kitfox has discontinued the Model IV, which was its only offering with a kit base at or below $25K.
Same for RANS, which recently trimmed its model offerings, putting all of its models above the threshold. What does this really tell us? That constant improvement in basic kits—including more and doing more of the work at the factory, which the market has definitely responded to—has raised the price floor.
With more builders demanding quickbuild options and willing to pay for them, you can hardly blame them. Pilots looking for the best bang for their buck on a tried and true ultralight will be delighted with the Jordan Lake Air-Bike 103. This ultralight originally debuted in 1995, was discontinued for a while, and has since made a return with the Jordan Lake
How To Choose An Ultralight Aircraft
Aero company. The Dakota Hawk can use a number of popular engines, from the stalwart Continental C-90/O-200 family to the Rotax 912 and 912S, on up to the Jabiru 3300. On the 80-hp 912, the Dakota Hawk's performance is listed
as 90-100 mph cruise and a climb rate of 800 to 1000 fpm. Stall speed is listed as 35 mph, no surprise given the wing loading. And speaking of wings, the Dakota Hawk has the option of folding feathers.
The airplane is primarily wood but comes with Dacron fabric and Stewart adhesives in base form. Quickbuild components are also an option. It's tempting for us to follow what's new and get sucked towards the high end of our sport, but with markets reeling and everyone looking to do more with fewer dollars, we felt it would be smart to reassess the less costly end of the spectrum.
So the thought experiment arrived as a completed idea: What kit can you buy for $25,000 or less? Now, before you start thinking that this is, already, a totally too large sum for the start of your project, consider that the average vehicle (statistically, a Ford pickup truck) costs around $37,000.
Quicksilver Mx Ii Sprint
Sure, that F-150 can take you to Home Depot, but can it take you flying? Not more than once, anyway. This single-place, Dacron-covered amphib has a max-gross weight of just 750 pounds, which makes most of the 60-ish horsepower on board.
A 90-mph cruise speed will be sufficient to drop into local lakes or check out the nearby grass strip. The HP has a host of options available, including a carbon-fiber hull, a $2800 upcharge that still gets the whole airframe kit in under $25K.
Next, consider your aircraft needs. For some builders, the desire to move towards the most sophisticated, capable end of the spectrum piles on cost, complexity and build time. Instead, at this price level for a new kitbuilt, we're talking basic, fun airplanes meant for good-weather flying.
Sometimes not very far from home. But, if you think about it, that's where many of us started, making a light, simple airplane a welcome bit of homecoming for experienced pilots. The key here is to keep the endpoint of the project in mind—what does the design want to be?
Avoiding mission creep is the only way to stay within a modest budget. There are other benefits to maintaining simplicity. A smaller engine needs less fuel, and therefore needs less fuel capacity; that gives you payload and performance.
A carburetor will be cheaper to own in the long run than fuel injection—simply from the parts count, to say nothing of the possibility of finding what you need in the used-equipment bin—and a fixed-pitch prop will exchange more limited performance
for—again—low weight and cost. Every one of these decisions in the simple-versus-complex thought process brings follow-on effects, some that are merely additive, some exponential. The Mark III Xtra has become Kolb's most popular aircraft. It is based off the Mark III Classic design with some aerodynamic enhancements to generate an extra 10-15 mph cruise speed.
A sturdy steel and aluminum construction, removable doors/windows and folding wings and tail complete the priced-just-right package. The base kit is $15,995 and that includes pre-drilled aluminum wing skins, a steel fuselage structure that's been fully welded and powder coated, the canopy and landing gear legs.
The Panther is built around the Corvair six-cylinder engine and that helps keep costs down as well; however, other engines in the 100-120 hp range can be used. Two Panther versions are available: one with 93 square feet of wing for LSA compliance and one with a smaller, 85-square-foot wing for better performance.
Morry Hummel's designs have always been about elegant minimalism, and that doesn't stop with the thoroughly updated H5. The metal H5 can be built as a tri-gear or taildragger, with up to 85 hp. Most are built with converted VW four-cylinder engines, which provide excellent performance: cruise of 100–130 mph, 800–1200 fpm climb, all with a 42 mph stall speed.
Empty weight is quoted as 460 pounds, against a max-gross of 850 pounds. I will liken designs like these to the last gasp flak that cessna and piper were filling the skies with insisting that huge heavy aerodynamically dirty planes were ideal while the kit plane folks and the european theater kept advancing with new materials and ever cleaner slippery cost efficient designs
. Performance is modest. We're talking airplanes whose cues come from the very earliest days of aviation. With the big Rotec radial, the full-sized Camel is good for 93 mph. Another option is a large VW-based engine, which helps keep the overall costs down.
You can build any of the Airdrome designs for relatively little money and you're almost certain to have the only one of its kind on your airport. The Arrow II builds on that legend with better visibility and modern jet-like lines.
A second seat is added behind the pilot. This tandem style seating configuration minimizes the difference in center of gravity when flying alone vs with a passenger. It may surprise you to learn that three of Van's basic kits slip under our $25,000 limit.
As you'd expect, the RV-3 and RV-4 do, but so does the most basic version of the RV-7 (not the -A model, though). For that, you'll have to forego the quickbuild options on the 7. Van's helps you with this decision on the RV-3 and -4, since there are no quickbuild options.
Performance is strong in this one. Engines from the Lycoming O-290 up to the O-360 can be accommodated, and an S-18 with a 180-hp engine and constant-speed prop is said to go 180 mph in cruise and climb at a strong 1500 fpm.
Currently, the full kit runs just over $20,000 for the two-seat taildragger. That was so good. I was planning to build my own homemade airplane. But one should take aviation course before starting building it. Where else can I take such a course?
Is there any online course? If there is then can you please suggest websites or institutions that give such a course? Editors note: The Airbike ultralight manufacturer ISON Aircraft has been sold to an Indiana-based company, JDT Mini-Max LLC.
They currently have the Mini-MAX and Hi-MAX aircraft in production. This is probably one of the cheapest ultralight aircraft with a price of only $2850 USD for short kit. So if you are looking for a cheap ultralight aircraft kit the Airbike might be the plane for you!
The base price of $23,529 does not include dual controls, brakes, or a fabric covering kit. It does, however, include a fully welded chrome-moly steel-tube cage as the primary structure. Both the wings and tail fold for storage.
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