LoPresti SwiftFury

[dmccormack]

Heh... Well, I'm crazy enough to have done a 5.3 hour leg. Once. What I like about having more fuel capacity is the ability to not fuel up every place I stop - I prefer to let the tanks empty out a bit more and buy more fuel from the places that are doing their part to keep flying as cheap as possible. But I also plan on at least an hour at landing, 'cuz I don't want to make the front page. .

I plan a one hour min reserve period, in every plane I fly, flown, want to fly.

The Chief burns about 3.6-4.0/ hour. 12 gal tank provides 2 hours for me, given my 1 hour requirement. But quite frankly the Chief is a bit cramped, so 2 hours is as much as I can take.

I've done 10.0 leg in a tip-tank equipped A36. That's about my limit.

 

[bbchien]

Jesse is exactly right. You don't do full application of power until the tail has been up for a coupld of seconds. I learned to fly in a Beech 17. It's like anything else, you learn. It's just an airplane. Get good instruction, and learn well.

 

[SCCutler]

... I learned to fly in a Beech 17...

Short, sweet, poetic!

 

[Ken Ibold]

The LoPresti Fury *is* a descendant of the Swift. IIRC, after Swift pretty much went under, TEMCO (who had also been building Swifts under license) got the rights and built them for a couple more years, but production ceased in 1951. At some point, Roy LoPresti wanted to revive the "Super Swift" (really, just a GC-1B Swift with a bigger 180-210hp engine added under STC, there was never an official Super Swift) as the Swift Fury, but for some reason the project was halted somewhere along the way and Roy died eventually. However, the LoPresti family still owned some sort of rights to the design (though I believe the type certificate for the original GC-1A and GC-1B Swifts is now owned by the Swift Museum Foundation). A few years ago, the project was resurrected by the rest of the LoPresti family.

This is all completely off the top of my head and I welcome corrections, especially from Ken Ibold who is actually involved in the LoPresti Fury project.

OBTW - I want one too. Gonna be a sweeeeeeet little airplane!

It's true that the Fury has been so heavily modified that it bears only a visual resemblence to the original. Kurt says there are a couple of wing ribs that are interchangeable, but that's all. Some of the redesign had to do with the legal dispute with the museum, but a lot of it just stemmed from advances in the art of engineering over the last five decades. At the time Roy fell off the ladder, the prototype was done, all of the tooling was in place and certification was fairly far along. The project's resurrection five years ago or whenever was part business opportunity, part homage to his legacy by his family. When I was still involved, we got a number of legitimate offers from communities willing to build a factory and train a workforce as an economic development project. (My previous life before aviation publishing was in economic development.) I have not been involved for a couple of years, and haven't spoken to RJ or Kurt in a while, but my understanding was that the Sebastian deal was a pretty solid one -- until the bottom fell out of the economy.

 

[Ken Ibold]

That might explain why Micco we under. I flew the SP-26 and it was a nice flying machine but I'd hardly call it a legitimate acro bird. Fun sport plane though. It was also in the high-200's.

I flew both the pre-acro SP-20 and the supposedly acro -26, and i agree with you. Both of them were fun sport planes, but not really acro mounts. Kind of Citabria-ish with a little snappier handling and way more ramp appeal.

But the reason Micco went under has a lot more to do with Seminole Indian tribe politics than the airplane market. Oh heck, the reason Micco was founded in the first place had more to do with Seminole Indian Tribe politics than the airplane market. Good ol' Chief Billy.