Epic NEW Kit! YOU Can BUILD and FLY - Archon Aircraft

imagine for a moment that is you looking out the window what did you just see was it military was it an unmanned aerial vehicle would you believe it is something you could build in your garage from a kit with simple tools then gear up just like a fighter pilot pre-flight and taxi out from your home airport and go fly [Music] well now you can introducing the arkon aircraft [Music] [Music] all right here it's uh oshkosh 2022 and met up with somebody who's kind of uh i don't know somewhat historical name in the industry of home builds they go ahead and introduce yourself and who you represent hi i'm dave hertner uh the owner of fisher flying products we're celebrating our 40th year of manufacturing kits this year uh started off with the very early days of the the ultralight craze with the fp 101 and we've grown our company into providing 14 different wooden aircraft kits and now we're departing in not departing the wooden aircraft kits but we're expanding our business to be able to handle um manufacturing metal kits for for other other companies and not just an ordinary or classic design this is something absolutely brand new i don't know if you've seen this as much as i have on social media over in greece is where this actually uh hails from i saw it i think maybe a year ago and it's just amazing i was like wow it'd be really awesome to see this but i don't know i'll make it over to greece to see it here it is in usa soil at oshkosh how did that happen well you were exposed to it about the same time that i was okay i found uh it on the internet as well and uh followed it uh through youtube and and just decided that uh i was looking for another different type of aircraft to to represent and to manufacture and i've built my own vans rv10 so i'm kind of a metal metal guy and as well as wood and uh so i cold called uh them and uh over in greece and got talking to them and asked them whether they had somebody who represented them or manufactured for them and it seemed to me that um on on youtube that they had done the development work flowing the heck out of the airplanes but didn't have necessarily the wherewithal to bring it to market and so that's what i was offering and uh and was successful in negotiating an agreement with them to bring it to the to north america so you now have the rights to build this over here well in all of north america basically i've got the worldwide manufacturing rates for it and i've teamed up with bill bill cannino at sport air usa to uh to support and uh and distribute the aircraft in the united states out of little rock arkansas all right so understand that you're going to be manufacturing this and have the rights to it is there some things that as a manufacturer you're gonna customize from this let's just call this the concept design well this is one of this is number two prototype of the two prototypes that were flown in greece uh to a total of about 700 hours of flight time hand built uh and utilizing the resources that gyorgos had in in the area he had to travel something like three hours to get to a metal shop that could do the bending and things like that that he needed not so good for production we you know we have those capabilities in southern ontario and canada i'm surrounded you know very close to the gta in in toronto and uh and my partner is uh in the automotive packaging business worldwide and so he has the resources to be able to manufacture any of the components for this aircraft and so we're in the very early uh state early stages of taking the 2d designs that giorgos has and converting them into a parametric model so that we can we can build an aircraft as good as the zenith they're as good as the bands um in quality because i think the market expects that they have good good quality components excellent build books and and uh and and that that translates into a into a quick build so i assume you're talking about match hole technology which becomes like the new standard today of kits correct so we're we're the parametric model will allow us to then translate to full cnc so what in your mind's eye where do you see this going are you going to offer everything the whole gamut of plans kits and quick build kit and fully built or what which direction our plan is the market for the most part demands something that comes together fairly quickly so we're only planning on offering a quick build kit and a complete kit so you would get everything except your your engine prop and avionics as a package uh pre-built to the the extent that we can pre-build under the 51 sure okay all right so going um back to uh the airplane itself for what are some of the uh the flight characteristics and operating speeds and that kind of stuff for it the aircraft was tested with a with a 40 horsepower two-stroke engine 40 horsepower over in grease and with that 40 horsepower engine he was seeing 110 110 miles an hour uh in in flight it's a very efficient airframe it's a what they call a flying fuselage aircraft um it looks almost like it has a bit of like a formula one uh character to it yeah and as such it doesn't take a lot of horsepower to keep it in flight or to actually accelerate it and so the numbers we have currently are as tested in greece uh 110 in cruise 155 vne and a 40 mile per hour stall wow that's pretty low considering the shape of it well the design of the aircraft the lower wing section as you see in the other parts of the video has a uh it presents itself flat to the to the airstream when you're in cruise but as you come and slow the aircraft down and increase the pitch angle the lower wing increases the lift so the air suddenly sees a lot more area right but it's controllable because it's actually a lifting body it's not just like putting a flap down okay and so that that allows for a very controlled descent you've got large rudders and large elevators in this so this airplane flies beautifully and as it in the videos you can see in other places on youtube it comes and lands very very gracefully down and it has such a elevator authority that you know with the fan still running uh pushing air across it you can ride a wheelie down the runway right now being that the uh this is a pusher and it's not quite a ducted fan but it's very close to the let's call the tunnel does that have some type of abducted effects to it yes we believe that that that tunnel effect is is quite uh um uh quite advantageous to the stability of the aircraft and um the efficiency of the of the propel propulsion system okay so this one here is a single seat which a lot of people come to market with first it's a little bit easier and cost-effective is there a plan to make a two-seater and would it be tandem or would it be side-by-side a tandem uh two-seat aircraft is is the next progression of of this design okay to keep with the military theme of the idistoon well ultimately we want to have something that we can use for training and we also want to be able to have people share the experience of this aircraft absolutely we are partnering with great companies like dine on avionics at dineon.com air tech coatings at airtechcoatings.com av nation youth magazine at av nation usa.com the aviators clinic at aviatorsclinic.com take a moment to go visit their websites at the links found below in the description of this video and visit our website at experimentalaircraftchannel.com for events our video library arrange an easy to find playlists on specific topics affiliate products aviation merchandise and so much more so is this uh fully retractable or is this just a look of retractable no this uh this aircraft is the prototype two the first one was fixed gear and the second one we have a retract mechanism that works the rear gear folds forward up into the fuselage there's cutouts in the side of the fuselage so it doesn't completely bury itself but it also stays just a little bit below the bottom of the aircraft so for whatever reason you have a an electrical system failure and the gear is up you'll be able to still land on rubber okay we'll have a skid plate on the front just behind where the uh the retract mechanism for the front gear and is this system electric hydraulic or just a manual um the original system with it was was a hydraulic system where we're electrifying that we're going to put electric actuators on that will be run by a an arduino box save a little bit of weight possibly right then it'll be programmed to self-check itself and when it starts up and the nice thing about the electric actuators is that powered off they can't move and based on what you see because you haven't done this in your version of it what are you hoping for or working towards of what the build time might be well i've built a vans rv eight or rv10 and it took me 10 years to build and i certainly don't want people to to do that over that kind of time so sure our our goal is that it's a quick super quick build kit that somebody who's working weekends and a couple of evenings a week could put together so our goal is that the kit is uh put together in about a year of working time if you're working weekends and a couple weekends a couple week nights a week okay and which uh power plant are you thinking or a range of power plants of offering with this more than a 40 horsepower i assume of course i think the the 40 horsepower is not something that's necessarily going to be installed in this airframe in the north american market so we're looking at a range of of power plants from 80 horsepower right up through to maybe 140. that that would include the the range of of 912 series engines um it would also include uh you know something like the helios uh 130 horsepower turbine engine so what range are we going to start off here with the price point you think of uh the airframe is going to go for 39 34 5 here at the show um we don't anticipate that going up right away um but we do have to go through you know our cost analysis that uh we hope we're not having to raise that price so we would like to see people being able to build the how to build the airplane for you know all in 55 through to a hundred thousand keep it under a hundred thousand dollars okay great well where can everybody find you online and you mentioned your youtube channel go ahead and tell everybody where to find you because i know you're putting out videos quite frequently actually now fisher flying products is is at www.fisherflying.com um our shop number is over to bill 519-933-2055 who is with sport air usa and he's going to be marketing the archon for the united states and i'll let him describe how uh how to contact him and get one of these aircraft all right bill if you could describe how you are involved in this awesome looking aircraft and business-wise it's really interesting it started off like eight years ago i started calling greece after i saw a few videos and for three years i called him and asked him about u.s distributorship and i didn't realize how much uh construction was required for the kit and then this year i got a call from dave who said well i own the world's uh distribution on the archon and my face failed i thought oh my all that time wasted and he said but i need you for the u.s distributor and i thought hey ray so it's a perfect match fisher has been in the kit business for a long time they're wanting to grow their effort into the aluminum side they've got a really exciting airplane to start with absolutely and we are the u.s distributor so fisher will provide all the kits to us in little rock arkansas and we'll ship kits from there we're central to the u.s it's normal for us to ship to the east coast west coast if if you have to if you call us about four seven we can get one to you overnight apart to you overnight by the next morning i don't want to do that every time you call right but it is possible it's available we're a good service center the kids will sell right now for thirty four nine uh with a thousand dollar deposit will lock that price up no matter what that future happens and they're available all the pricing and the details will be available on our website uh www.archon.arrowarchon.aero and while we're talking here what else does sport air usa offer as far as either either kits or aircraft that are flying well we offer several other aircraft that are flying with primary the zlynn savage norton is our our biggest seller and the one that we're in the stole business with we also sell sea rays and we have a really nice line of z floats for aluminum floats up to 1500 with the introduction of the rv15 though we're now going to come out with a 1900 or a 2100 as soon as they stabilize where the gross weight of that airborne right right we also intend to have a bill center that'll be a part of that to assist people with building okay making sure that i'm a part of the f-37 astm committee and we one of the studies in trying to get the mosaic rules out was action of third-party active builders like that and so the faa is interested in that and we want to work with them to make sure that we do a bill center that makes everyone happy that'll be very good it's nice to see more and more options for people or builders as people get to um on any aircraft 90 done 90 to go and seem to get stuck there and they need some more professional guidance so and you know i don't want a 10-year bill yeah and most people don't want that either so if we can find a way that's a happy medium where we can provide a skill to assist them and but they've got to learn something you know they've got to see part of the fa's requirements is that this is for their education so sure they've got to have an education component to make sure that they're learning we're just not going to build it and give it to them don't just go through the motion you actually have to know your airplane yes yes because who's going to be the maintainer of that airplane that's the builder and he'll get a builders repairman certificate from the faa but he's got to be able to maintain it we can do the rotax engine and all the other stuff but he's the one who'll be primarily responsible for engine maintenance exactly [Music] you

Channel: Experimental Aircraft Channel

Views: 491,007

Keywords: aircraft, aviation, experimental aircraft, light sport aircraft, ultralight aircraft, ultralight, affordable, flying, fly, pilot, how to fly, how to build, flight training, flight instruction, stol, stol drag, stol competition, trent palmer, mike patey, archon, military aircraft, jets, military jets, aircraft carrier, modern jets, futuristic aircraft, experimental aircraft channel

Id: bnCxGH8ugAY

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022