ANN’s Jim Campbell spoke with Steve Wood, President of Spirit Engineering, at the 2025 EAA AirVenture Air Show and Fly-in in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Jim said everyone’s been talking about the little silver plane that you have to go see it- there are four of them here that flew up from Colorado and burned just a total of 88 gallons.
When asked how likes creating a sensation, Wood said it was exactly the sensation they expected to create because they kept it a secret. He said it’s a great product and they’re excited to be at Oshkosh and it’s been a long road to get there, and developing the airplane and the engine were just a lot of hard work.
Wood said the company made the decision before they even started that they weren’t going to go anywhere or say anything to anyone until they were done.
Spirit is ready for production, and they went to AirVenture to get an understanding of what kind of build rate they need to get ready for.
Wood mentioned the photo in their booth that everyone thought was AI or fake with its rows and rows of assembled fuselages but they’re actually really there, about 2 dozen already built, and there are a lot more behind the scenes that are nearly ready to get to that stage.
What they don’t want to do is go home and complete all the ones they have and then restart the pipeline. They want to go back, establish a rate for building and then build at a level rate based on what their perception of demand is from AirVenture. So if they decide they need to build 400 in the next 12 months then that’s what they’ll do.
The airplane is not a speedster with a 42 hp engine, but it cruises at 100+ readily on a couple gallons of gas per hour. It needs 91 octane minimum. The company flew its four airplanes to OSH using 100 octane because that’s what was available at the airport.
To understand their confidence in the engine, the ones they flew to OSH are right at about 20 hours. They ran for the first time just a few days before they took off. They did the production acceptance flight testing right after the production acceptance ground tests and then received the SLSA airworthiness certificates.
Their goal was to run them for 10 hours and do an oil and filter change before flying over the Rockies on their way to AirVenture, and they ran without a hitch.
Wood said they’re hoping their airplane could be a leader in the new era of MOSAIC. He then mentioned that they’re hoping to target the market of non-active pilots who aren’t active because of the cost. Spirit’s SE-1 has a low acquisition cost, a low direct operating cost, and low storage cost with its folding wings, and Wood said time will tell, but he thinks they have the right formula.
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