Viking Aircraft Engines takes a Honda block and sets it up as an aircraft powerplant. Many homebuilders have installed them since the company reorganized in 2010. Their powerful engines have 
He has altered the wing to be all metal with a bonded adhesion that leaves the metallic upper surface as clean as a composite wing. Fat tundra tires fitted to the show example gave the taildragger a gutsy appeal.
The events triggering the long distance migration by Viking and Chipper are the Alaska Airman show in May— held in the cavernous FedEx hangar plus outside displays — plus the Valdez STOL competition.
Now in its 21st season for 2018, the 
One week later comes the 
On a single day of recording several videos at Sun ‘n Fun 2018, Videoman Dave and I came across two light kit aircraft designs operating as STOL — Short Take Off and Landing — aircraft. By itself that is hardly unusual. STOL designs are plentiful and popular. However, when you hear that two STOL-focused airplanes will be flying from Florida to Alaska, that’s something else entirely. Flying from one corner of a big country to its diagonal opposite is a fairly significant undertaking. Depending on routes chosen, this is well beyond a 4,000-mile flight. Let’s see — at 80-90 mph an hour …well, suffice it to say, that’s a lot of flying, 40+ hours, each way, would not surprise me. Viking 180 Horse on Zenith Super Duty At Sebring 2018 Zenith Aircraft showed their Super Duty version of their CH750 high wing, a STOL airplane equipped with a large engine and tires to match.
Belite entrepreneur James Weibe has successfully used his tech industry background to raise interest for his latest project, this time his first two seater called Chipper. (It was named Pipper but that apparently energized the anxieties of Piper Aircraft lawyers so James altered the name.)
James has informed his Facebook and email readers with continual updates. After making initial flights fairly recently, he has judged the aircraft able to make a cross country flight.
Chipper uses power from the 912 
"I flew Chipper to Angel Fire, New Mexico," James exclaimed. "I flew nonstop one way (960 miles roundtrip) from Wichita, Kansas to Angel Fire, performed flight tests, and then returned to Marion, Kansas before the sunset." Now that's a good day's flying.
"Angel Fire is the fourth highest elevation airport in the United States at 8,322 feet above sea level," James reported. "Density altitude was 10,400 feet." Three conditions can degrade aircraft performance at altitude: higher elevation, higher temperature, and higher humidity. The latter is not much of a problem in desert-like New Mexico but all affect aircraft performance. (Humid air, made up of water vapor, is less also dense.)
In my experience, operating at more than 10,000 feet density altitude causes a Cessna 150 or 172 to take significantly more runway to get airborne and climb performance can be sharply reduced.
"Chipper's takeoff roll length was 600 feet," said a proud James. "Why did they make the runway 8,900 feet long at Angel Fire," James wondered with a twinkle in his eye?
"Climbout was greater than 200 fpm," he added. Now that's not nearly as fast as a 80-horsepower Chipper would perform at sea level but it's better than a Cessna 150. "Everything in the pattern was normal," James continued, "it just took longer to climb."
For his evaluation, Chipper's test weight was 950 pounds. He observed that a normally-aspirated (carbureted) 80-horsepower Rotax develops 52 horsepower at Angel Fire's pattern altitude.
