Lazair.com

Mark,

That's a really cool picture! Hope you got all the salt off your plane.

I did fly my series 1 with the floats. The performance, even with my re-drive Pioneer's, was pretty marginal, especially in hot weather. It could, however, get off the water very well. With the regular Pioneer set up, it was very hard to even do that. I believe that the desire to sell floats, which are very popular in Canada, was the driving force to go to a larger engine. One of the guys at Ultraflight had some knowledge of the Rotax 185, and they found that they could purchase it locally. Although it was a very old design, they felt it was well suited because it produced it's rated power at a fairly low rpm compared to most 2 cycle engines. Also, Dale had an aversion to reduction drives due to complexity and cost. The Lazair already had a cost penalty just by have two engines, compared to most of their competitor's one.

Chappy