Kleines Flugzeug Über Alles

Headquartered on southern Germany’s Eggenfelden Airport (EDME), ScaleWings has dazzled the light-sport-aircraft industry with its SW-51 Mustang, a seventy-percent replica of the North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft of the Second World War. Produced at ScaleWings’ manufacturing facility in Krosno, Poland, the SW51 is supplied as a complete ready-to-fly-aircraft or as a kit for amateur construction.

On 05 February 2023, ScaleWings announced SW-51 serial-number 004 had made its maiden flight into the skies of Germany. The flight marked an important milestone in the ScaleWings SW-51 Mustang program and occasioned the first flight of an SW-51 assembled by a customer under the company’s build assist program appositely dubbed Build Your Legend. Serial-number 004—known also as D-ESUI—is the first SW-51 to receive German registration.

Advertised by ScaleWings as the world’s most accurate downsized P-51 Mustang replica, the SW-51’s all-carbon airframe surfaces are adorned with over one-hundred-thousand textures (e.g. rivets, sheet-metal joints, screws, panels) characteristic of the original aircraft. The end result bears a startlingly uncanny resemblance to the P-51’s classic, aluminum monocoque.

The SW-51’s design features a full-cantilever low-wing and a two-tandem-seat cockpit enclosed beneath a bubble-canopy evocative of North American’s P-51D and subsequent iterations of the Mustang. Flight instrumentation consists of G3X EFIS combined with classic analog gauges. The aircraft’s conventional (read “tail-wheel”) landing-gear is to be offered in both fixed and retractable configurations.

The SW-51 is powered by a single, forward-mounted, 141-horsepower, air and liquid-cooled, four-cylinder, four-stroke Rotax 915iS turbocharged engine driving either a 3-bladed DUC Hélices carbon-fiber CS fixed-pitch, or 4-blade variable-pitch tractor propeller. The variable-pitch drivetrain motivates the 1,653-pound (MGTOW) machine to a Vne of 216-knots and climb-rates better than 1,500-feet-per-minute.

Standard SW-51 kits are priced at approximately $138,000 and include: fuselage, center wing, outer wings, empennage, control surfaces and actuation systems, landing-gear, seats, and fuel system. Optional additional equipment includes but is not limited to: firewall forward kit including Rotax 915iS and MT-4-blade-propeller, avionics kit including Dynon HDX or Garmin G3X suites, and GRS Galaxy’s Ballistic Rescue System (BRS).

FMI: www.scalewings.com