Aircraft Selection

Types of Builds

There are numerous aircraft that can be built. In general, they fall into these categories, from most difficult to “easiest”:

  • Unique bespoke build – Design your own aircraft.

  • Scratch build – Build from someone else’s plans. Example: Verhees Engineering D1.

  • Kit build – Build from a kit which includes many of the main parts. Example: Zenith Aircraft.

  • Quick kit build – A kit that has much more of the parts built into subassemblies. Example: Van’s Aircraft.

  • Build assist kit – Build a kit at the manufacturer’s facility, with their help. Example: Sling Aircraft.

Kits vary greatly.

Kits with CNC “match-drilled” parts save a lot of assembly time, as all the holes are pre-drilled and everything should line up correctly.

Kit Manufacturers

There are many manufacturers of kit aircraft. One source to find the kit manufacturers is to review the FAA’s spreadsheet of aircraft registrations, avaiable here:

I wrote a crufty bash script to parse the database to find the current number of registrations of various kit manufacturers. The script and other details are in this repo:

A list of the main manufacturers and the number of current registations of their kit builds:

Manufacturer

Registrations

Bearhawk

104

CubCrafters

229

Glasair

646

Just

353

Kitfox

570

Lancair

615

Murphy

133

Porto

11

Progressive

216

RANS

769

Rocky Mtn

13

Savannah

28

Skystar

289

Sling

150

Sonex

539

VANS

6,594

Velocity

193

Zenith

1,182

There are many considerations for selection a manufacturer, such as how long they have been in business, the quality of their designs, their support, their reputation, etc.

Best

Which aircraft is best depends on a variety of considerations, such as the “mission”, the manufacturer, kit quality, and on and on.

I selected the Zenith 750 CH Super Duty.