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| RIGHT HERE AND now I willingly admit that my favorite aircraft are seaplanes and amphibious airplanes. I'll go up in just about anything that flies, but seaplanes have a certain something that appeals to me. By a stroke of good luck, while on assignment in Florida recently, I was invited to fly a beautiful new seaplane called a Cornp Air 8, produced by Aerocomp, Inc. It was powered with a 650-hp Walter 601 turbine | engine, swinging a
three-blade prop with beta control. (Beta control means that the prop is capable of being
put into reverse pitch to allow the plane to back up.) As soon as I found out I'd be flying a seaplane, I dug out my stack of old logbooks and pored over them to refresh my memory about what kinds of seaplanes I've flown over the years. |
There was a 40-hp Piper J-2, many 65-hp J-3s, a 150-hp Super Cub, a 150-hp Colonial Skimmer, a 225-hp Republic Sea Bee, a 300-hp Cessna 195, a 200-hp Lake Buccaneer, a Fairchild 24 with a 165-hp Warner engine, a Stinson 108 with a 190-hp Lycoming, a 65-hp Taylorcraft, a Cessna 172 with a 180-hp Lycoming, a 200-hp Adventurer Amphibian, as well as a dozen or more ultralights, including Quicksilvers, Drifters, a Kitfox, an Avid Flyer and a Lazair. | ||
| BELOW LEFT: To evaluate another
configuration of the Comp Air 8, the aircraft was fitted with Aerocomp's excellent
composite Super Floats . BELOW RIGHT: The rugged composite floats allow the plane to be nosed onto the shore for easy loading and unloading of passengers and baggage. |
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| Text by Norm Goyer Photos by Norm Goyer and Bill Fedorko |
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| Comp Air 8: "Heavy-Hauler FloatPlane" |
© CUSTOM
PLANES magazine |
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