Air Création’s High-Performance Floats

COLORFUL – The dashing underside of the XP-17 wing (with white on top, allowing the light through) mates well with the Air Création brand-identifying red chassis and floats.

LOADED PANEL – Seaplanes are often sparsely equipped with instruments – most flying is done near the deck while referring to visual references. But Silvain’s GTE floatplane with an XP-17 wing uses the stock GTE 7-instrument console (intercom to left, key start to right, radio on the T-panel).

PROTECTED PROP – This front-end view shows the sleek float system which comes with the fabric water spray protector for the prop. Given the high value of a 4-blade prop, this is a worthy addition. You might like the way it looks, too.

SERIOUSLY ENGINEERED – Air Création is one of the world’s largest aircraft builders with 2,500 trikes flying. Designers make wide use of customized parts and all are beautifully finished.

COMFORTABLE CABIN – Though the GTE is wide open, these well-padded seats and a secure helmet will make cross-country flights pleasurable. Note the nicely housed throttle near the pilot’s right hip.

CANADIAN REP – Silvain Boucher smiles back from the captain’s seat of his GTE XP-17 floatplane. Though the GTE has a small windscreen, Silvain prefers a helmet with full-face protection.

WATER RUDDERS – I know from personal experience that trikes without water rudders are nearly impossible to maneuver in the water; you don’t have a tail in prop blast to help. Like most, these rudders retract for beaching.

WATER FRIENDLY – With very little draft and no tail to consider, maneuvering in a trike is as easy at a seaplane base as on a crowded airport ramp. Note the handy control bar tie-downs attached at each corner.

Air Création is a serious company and a world-class trike builder with an impressive sales record. Their serious trikes sport beautiful hardware and numerous customized components. Right down to their trademark red color, Air Création is serious about building a remarkable trike, a series of them in fact.
So when Air Création puts a float set on the market, you can count on the fact that it was well researched and exquisitely crafted.
Now, let’s combine that with the XP-17 wing, the largest in the company’s XP series. Floats are mounted under and the wing atop a GTE trike carriage which has been in production for several years. Put this all on a lake in Florida and you have the makings of an interesting experience.
Another 20-Year Veteran
Gilles Bru and Jean Yves le Bihan founded the French company in 1982. Air Création’s dealer in Canada reports, “It has grown steadily ever since, building around 4,000 wings and 2,500 trike-units for sale in more than 50 countries.”
Today Air Créationemploys 25 people, four of whom  are in the technical department designing new products, and 14 work on the production of ultralight trikes and wings.With annual sales of about $2.5 million, Air Création exports 60% of its products.
Based in southern France, the ultralight builder offers three trike models: the Racer, a single-seat design powered by a 40-hp Rotax 447 or 50-hp Rotax 503 engine; the 2-seat GTE shown in the accompanying photos, or as a variant called the Buggy (evaluated in the May ’01 issue of Ultralight Flying! magazine) usually equipped with a 65-hp Rotax 582; and their top-of-the-range Clipper, which is offered with the Rotax 582 and 81-hp Rotax 912 engines.

Air Création also offers a variety of wings, including the Fun 18 single-surface wing (best used with the Racer trike), the entire XP series of four sizes, and the newest Kiss wing in two sizes. As with all trikes, it is the wing that dictates the lifting capacity of the ultralight, not the carriage or whatever engine is strapped to it. To their credit, Air Création has long made it very clear that their wings are to carry only a placarded amount.
The big XP-17 wing can do the job of lifting the GTE/582, two occupants, and the float system. In fact, the larger wing is valuable to assure enough square footage to get the floats and aircraft out of the water.
The Air Création floats were seven years in development. “They sunk a number of them,” U.S. representative Rob Albright says. To me, they appeared very stoutly constructed; indeed, our test floats have reportedly seen 10 years of duty yet looked nearly new.
Air Création’s floats are made from low-density foam contained in a fiberglass epoxy envelope, which Air Création calls “unsinkable.” After logging thousands of hours of float operation, designers feel they have perfected the floats and hardware assembly.
The float option includes antioxidation treatment for all steel parts on the trike as well as a special treatment for the exhaust system, which is additional justification for the rather high price tag they assign to the float package. For more detailed information as to which carriage and wing combinations you can use, contact Air Création USA.
 
Well-Integrated Design

The GTE can be adjusted for center-of-gravity attachment while on the ground without having to disconnect the wing. However, I wouldn’t call this change “quick and easy.” An inch forward or aft on the carriage-to-wing connection makes a noticeable difference in pilot muscular effort. This is not an in-flight trim system – which you can have on some Air Création trikes – but similar to ground-adjustable pitch on a propeller. You may skip the ground adjustment but you’ll experience a slightly out-of-trim feel in pitch. That is, you may have to push out or pull in at all times for some speed settings. Such effort is easily achieved, though on longer flights it may prove tiring.
The seating arrangement is innovative in that the rear seat can be reconfigured for solo use. After a few quick changes with the seat belts and the attachment of a backrest plate (via a couple of small delrin-type clamps), the front seat has good back support. Of course, with someone seated in the back, the front pilot has back support without this reconfiguration although you are sitting right up against your rear- seat occupant.
The earlier GT-BI model that preceded the modern GTE had no windscreen. While the windscreen on the float-equipped GTE blessed the chassis with nicer lines, it still didn’t do much for reducing windblast. At the speeds this ultralight can fly (80+ mph), you’ll want a helmet with good face protection, such as the one worn by my check pilot Silvain Boucher, shown in the photos.
If you examine the GTE chassis carefully, you’ll observe many nice finish details: a plastic box around the throttle handle which hides its workings, the leather protectors around the control bar ends, the friction tape on the control bar, and a beautifully shaped and functional fiberglass instrument pod.
Cockpit entry and exit are as straightforward as you’d expect. The procedure calls for you to start by putting your foot on the main front-to-rear structural member, often called a “keel.” Next place your hand on the forward support tube. Finally, step into the back seat by putting your feet on the rear seat pegs and lowering your bottom. Air Création advocates boarding the aircraft from the left-hand side of the trike, being careful not to move the throttle control on the right-hand side of the aircraft. The throttle isn’t delicate; the purpose of this advice is to keep from inadvertently advancing the throttle prior to start-up. Aircraft of all descriptions have caused damage when an engine roars to life more powerfully than expected.
Air Création locates the control bar basetube higher than many other trike brands, however, this may account for some difference in flying qualities. Another description is to say the control bar isn’t higher; rather, the pilot (and trike carriage) are lower. In weight-shift aircraft with pendulum stability a lower position of trike and pilot equates to finer control. If the weight-shifting mass is farther below the wing, the movements of the control bar are physically easier and the resultant response to a control bar movement will be less. Put another way, the control pressures are lighter but your range of movement is smaller.
Air Création’s control bar is about chin high (depending on pilot size, of course), and your arms must reach up slightly to grasp it. Some trike brands have the control bar basetube at stomach height and your arms are lowered to hold the bar. You might think of this as merely a personal matter but some control difference is certain. Air Création says, “The wing geometry of this new generation of flex-wings gives tremendous stability in the air and on the ground from having the center of gravity set well below the raised thrust line.”

GTE on H
2
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The GTE’s throttle system is excellent; you can use either foot or hand for power adjustments. Trike experts recommend the foot throttle for takeoff and landing as you need both hands on the control bar. Once at altitude, you can shift to the right-side hand throttle. The throttle override linkage works beautifully. Whichever control is advanced the most is the dominant one. Once well clear of the pattern, you can hold the control bar with your left hand and move the hand throttle till you feel resistance. Afterward, you can relax your foot; the throttle will stay put nicely.
On water, the procedure is the same as on land – full power to accelerate and clear the surface. Once aloft, you can switch to the hand throttle for cruising or stay with the foot throttle if you wish to perform a series of takeoffs and landings, as I did.
The trickier part is float handling. For comparison, when I flew the Krücker Amphib earlier in the day, I added full power and pushed out on the bar liberally. Within a short time, the Krücker left the water and I relaxed the push-out effort. This is common trike technique, good in most situations. It was inappropriate on the GTE float trike.
With these floats, you can push out liberally, but you may want to moderate the effort before leaving the water. However, takeoffs are fairly easy to figure. It was the landing that forced more attention to the task.

When approaching the water in the GTE float trike, you maintain the same approximate level attitude you do in most floatplanes. However, on reaching the water, I found the experience closer to my work in a Cessna 172 on floats rather than the majority of ultralights. I found, with advice from Silvain in the rear seat, that it’s best to ease into the water. While Air Création’s floats have superb flotation and while they don’t inhibit cross-country flying like some float ultralights, they are not as tolerant of pitching motions while on the water. I’m not sure that you could stuff the nose of the floats by incorrect controls, but it felt like you could. Silvain seemed apprehensive of my experiments, and once had to advise of  landings that were either rather firm or tended to porpoise. After flying a good number of floatplanes, I found the Air Création floats demanded more technique than most others. It was a world apart from the Krücker experience that day.
On my first landing I came in too fast, held a fixed attitude (that is, no flare), and touched down too fast. This caused some porpoising that took deliberate effort to cease. I bounced back up and grappled with the control somewhat.
However, I hasten to add that a “silver lining” comes with the Air Création floats. The overall package is one better suited to distance flying than most ultralights on floats. With the GTE/582 carriage, and the big but tightly stretched XP-17 wing combined with the sleek floats, the trike can still manage speeds into the 80-mph range. For comparison, the Krücker floats with the big Butterfly wing from GibboGear couldn’t easily maintain 50 mph for an extended flight. The Krücker floats were far easier on the water operations but you wouldn’t want to fly too far. On the other hand, the Air Création float trike could carry you comfortably to a seaplane fly-in some 200 miles away. And you’d get there before the party was over. Albright says most basic trike or ultralight floatplanes tend to be trailered to the fly-ins.
With a bit of practice, say 20 to 30 takeoffs and landings in varying conditions and lake sizes, the Air Création floats would easily become favorites. They work excellently; you simply must respect their performance edge.
I also liked the way the kill switch is buried within a U-shaped bracket, to prevent inadvertent shutdown. Europeans tend to such hardware detail more than many American designs. On a floatplane, killing the engine is normal as you approach a docking or beaching situation. Good access is desirable, but I liked the hooded switch at all other times.
Not only do the Air Création floats perform admirably, the GTE/582 trike with the big XP-17 wing handles better than I expected. It was a day of some surprises.
Big XP Wing

My earlier experience with Air Création’s XP wing series had me expecting a flight that might resemble a Nautilus machine workout.
However, I was pleased, even delighted, with the control characteristics of the XP-17 wing. Having flown Air Création’s XP-11, XP-12 and XP-15 wings, as well as two of their newer Kiss wings, my preference leans heavily toward the smaller wings, which I find highly satisfactory. It took far too much work to fly the XP-15 in my opinion, though other pilots feel differently.
Albright is one such person. He prefers the way the XP wings will hold a final approach line more easily than a more responsive wing that has to be flown all the way to roll-out. This is a statement understood by many trike pilots of comparable wings. Smaller, more frequent control actions mean you are deflecting the trike carriage less, which works out well for precise flying unless you need sudden movement in another direction. The stiff wing in concert with the heavy trike carriage poses a challenge.
So, if I didn’t care for the XP-15 wing – certainly when compared to their newer, easier handling Kiss wing series – then you’d think that the XP-17 wing would be even less desirable. In fact, I turned down a chance to fly the XP-17 with a 81-hp Rotax 912 on a Clipper when I first saw it. I truly believed it would be too heavy-handling to suit my personal interest.
Despite my misgivings, I found the GTE/582 with an XP-17 wing handled surprisingly well, possibly because I’d convinced myself it would be a more difficult experience. Perhaps the added weight of the floats actually helped. Pendular stability – a leveling characteristic foreign to most 3-axis pilots – is quite significant. The lower a greater amount of weight hangs from the wing of a trike, the more stable it will be, generally speaking. This is one reason why added weight can increase roll pressures. A counteracting factor is the weight that your arms must displace to effect control in any axis. That said, more weight suspended from a pendulum joint can, to some extent, make handling more efficient, if you have foresight in your approach planning and finesse in your control efforts.
Albright spoke of flying 300 miles to another lake, stating that doing so in the XP-17 wing would be much easier than the Krücker. Many of those pilots will trailer their amphibian to a splash-in where the Air Création is more likely to be flown to the event, Albright maintains. “Easier” is a relative word, and it means different things to different people in different situations.
The maximum speed I saw at liberal power and liberal pull-in was about 140 kilometers an hour. The instruments on Silvain’s GTE were set up with a mixture of metric and English measurements: altitude in feet, speed in kilometers per hour; water temperature in centigrade, EGT/CHT in Fahrenheit. At 140 kilometers an hour, we were flying 88 mph, pretty darn fast in an open-cockpit trike with a big wing and large floats – an impressive performance, I felt.

Air Création would also like you to know that one of their trikes holds the world altitude record for a microlight at 32,000 feet set by Serge Zin in September 1994 near Lyon, France using a GTE chassis with a Rotax 582 and the XP-15 wing. And they claim ownership of world records for time-to-climb to a height of about 10,000 feet (in just 5 minutes 40 seconds), and time-to-climb to a height of about 20,000 feet (in only 14 minutes 54 seconds) set by Roland Coddens with a Racer trike and their speedy XP-11 wing (my personal favorite of the XP series).
Breathe Easy
Over their 21 years of building trikes, Air Création has perfected the art to a high level. Go aloft in one and you’ll quickly see this is a high-quality product that has been extensively engineered, and passes demanding certification schemes like a champion.
The company is careful about many details. Air Création advocates boarding the aircraft from the left-hand side of the trike, being careful not to disturb the throttle control on the right-hand side of the aircraft. Being careful about this keeps the trike from getting away from you during start-up, especially if you are pull-starting from outside the seat.
For a decade or so, Air Création has offered recoil-type shoulder belt systems that integrate with the normal lap belt. They were one of the first companies to add this feature; many trike-makers still provide only lap belts that have proved insufficient in violent upsets. The GTE’s belts are anchored to the main upright support tube (behind the rear occupant).
As I always do, I ran through a series of longitudinal stability checks by pulling or pushing the controls and then releasing. On the noseover (pull aft), I noticed the nose came up rather sluggishly although the speed accumulation was not particularly fast during this maneuver. Undesirable speed buildup is usually the problem associated with this tendency, but the trike design’s inherent pitch stability – heavily due to the powerful pendulum force – keeps this from being a problem. Contrarily nose- up (push forward) movement resulted in a proper and normal response. The GTE/582 with the XP-17 wing bobbed back and forth only a few times and then stayed relatively level.
Power-off stalls in the heavily loaded but large-winged GTE float trike came at about 35 to 40 mph, according to the installed ASI. A power-off stall, with mild movement of the bar, produced no real break, returning quickly to horizontal and revealing good stall characteristics.

Repeating stalls with a very brisk motion, pushing all the way out to the support tube (equivalent to a joystick pulled fully back), the GTE and XP-17 did break. However, recovery was normal and fast. When I further aggravated the stall by keeping the bar full forward, it recovered anyway, on its own and in a short amount of time.
Air Création is the only manufacturer to have carried out in-flight tests of the BRS rocket parachute
system. On many machines made by the French builder, the activating handle is coupled to an ignition interrupter, which automatically cuts out the engine and the propeller to ensure that the parachute is successfully launched and the aircraft descends in a horizontal position. Air Création has worked quite deeply with BRS to perfect the mount of the parachute systems on their trikes.
Buying Your Trike Floatplane
The GTE/582 with XP-17 wing isn’t your lowest cost choice. A well-equipped Air Création trike on floats is going to run around $30,000. This includes $14,580 for the GTE/582/4-blade trike chassis, plus $5,947 for the big wing, plus $8,500 for the entire float system. The entire package weighs 523 pounds (306-pound chassis less nosewheel, 117-pound wing, 100-pound float system).
You can buy some float ultralights for less than $20,000 though they may not compare well to Air Création’s float-equipped trikes. Yet it isn’t hard to bid up the price even further. To their extra credit, the Air Création entry comes well-equipped and you may not
want more than the basic gear. However, some options might tempt you.

All Air Création wings are delivered standard with white UV-stop – and very durable – Trilam sailcloth on the upper surface. More conventional fabrics are used for red leading edge accents, red front lower surface, white rear lower surface, and a red keel pocket. Customers may choose different colors for each part of the wing as an option, although the upper surface is manufactured only in white.
If you want to have your trike wing color personalized, you can have a wide variety, thanks to Air Création’s computerized sailcloth-cutting equipment. This allows buyers to create their own patterns on the lower wing surface. The shape, size and colors of the panels may be chosen within certain limits of symmetry and cut. Air Création USA can advise further on this. Think of it as a custom paint job, except you don’t need to add the weight of paint and someone else – an expert sailmaker – does the work.
Although the French company uses a name that won’t necessarily relate to American pilots, one option I recommend if you plan to do much cross-country flying is the “Pack Vmax.”This option is only available for the XP wings and includes a pitch trim system. It also includes slip-on fairings on the control bar downtubes and the kingpost to reduce drag at higher speeds. Air Création’s trim system is simple, lightweight and is operated by altering the tension on the luff lines on the wing. Like any trim device, the control-wheel-adjusted system relieves pilot effort to hold the control bar in one position.
If you know any hang glider pilots, you might find a ready group willing to pay your fuel expenses and perhaps buy you dinner at the end of the day if you will tow them aloft. One option Air Création offers, available on their S and SL models, is a tow release system. Using a hollow shaft C-type reduction drive, pull forces are directly through the center of thrust. Such a system allows controlled pulling of streamers, advertising banners, and hang gliders though you’ll need permission for hang glider towing and can only do the other operations in countries that allow commercial operation in ultralights. The USA is not one of these at present, though such functions may be permitted by a Special Light-Sport Aircraft, if that rule passes as presently envisioned.
Finally, if you’re planning instruction in your Air Création trike, on or off floats, you may want the dual controls option. This allows full control of the trike from the rear seat. The instructor can override the steering and foot throttle at any time, leaving both hands free for controlling the airframe. (This option is not available on the Buggy model.)
Warm spring and summer days make that bright red Air Création GTE on floats look mighty fine. I suggest you hitch a ride whenever possible. Bring your checkbook with you.