Search Results for : Flight Design

Ken Godin, an endlessly enthusiastic, high-energy entrepreneur and 30 year ultralight, LSA and GA pilot, created his own company, Composiclean, a few years back, to market a line of pH-neutral and other cleaning products that are finding their way to air shows, car shows, dealer ramps and at docksides around the world.If you’ve scanned the Aircraft Spruce catalog recently you may have seen Ken’s goods. *** Like many innovations, Compsiclean came about through a vacuum in the market place. Ken was a key player at Tom Peghiny’s Flight Design USA operation until 2008, when he left to become Director of Sales and Service at REMOS Aircraft. *** “Tom asked me if I knew of a neutral cleaning product for his CT line of LSA. He had seen first hand that some composite components can be negatively affected by the alkaline pH of the cleaners typically available..most cleaners are either acidic or alkaline.” Ken’s a networking guy so he went looking for a neutral-pH cleaner.

Who doesn’t like to ride around in a clean machine? If it’s your car, you have thousands of products to choose from…and no big problem if you use the wrong stuff. But if your LSA is a composite airplane, you need the right stuff and it comes from Composiclean. When entrepreneur Ken Godin took his products to this summer’s AirVenture Oshkosh, his persuasive selling ability and some superior products helped him grab the attention of aviation big shots, like aerobatic pilot Shawn Tucker and Flight Design owner, Matthias Betsch, among numerous others. *** If you react with a “Ho-hum, it’s just soap” response, let me suggest you go have a look at Composiclean’s testing results. I was surprised what the wrong cleaners can do to composite surfaces. Keep scrolling down. Yikes! Then research elsewhere on the Composiclean website to check out the right stuff.

Back from a busy, weather-challenging (for photography) trip to the Bahamas, I stopped by to visit Dan Johnson and his soul mate Randee at their Spruce Creek air park digs near Daytona Beach, Florida. If you haven’t had the pleasure, visit Spruce Creek sometime to see how cool an air park can be. Hundreds and hundreds of homes, condos, hangars and “planeports,” even on-site business and a restaurant make this a wonderful aviation destination. It’s my fourth visit over the years and always a pleasure … as it is to visit with Dan and Randee.
This time I got to meet Dan’s partner-in-aviation Brian Boucher, a long time, big-jet professional pilot and one of four owners of the new Flight Design CTLSi I flew for Plane & Pilot magazine up in CT at Tom Peghiny’s US HQ just before it left for Spruce Creek. The opportunity came up for Dan to join the partnership and the numbers made sense, so now the Johnsons are part owners of that lovely fuel-injected CTLSi.

This year’s LSA bash in Sebring which starts next Thursday, 17 January and runs through the weekend looks to be far and away the best ever. Jana Filip and crew have been working hard all year to make this a top professional event.
Lots of new things in addition to the usual comfy, cozy gathering that’s LSA-only include a twilight airshow (can you spell Patty Wagstaff?), Seaplane Pilot’s Association Seaplane Base at Lake Jackson, Model Airplane Contest, a fully restored American Airlines DC-3 on display, and…oh yeah…tons of top LSA demos for you to get up close and personal with. Here’s some hot points:
• 80+ inside exhibitors; • 80+ outside exhibitors • 20,000+ attendance expected • keynote speeches by Randy Babbitt (former FAA head) and Patty Wagstaff • lots of new product rollouts including at least a couple LSA I’ve heard about through the grapevine. • …and the 3rd annual Bahamas flyout for four days of island fun, mon.