On 2 February 2011 Mike, James and Jean’s good friend, climbing partner and co-movie maker, Marianne Schwankhart visited The Airplane Factory to help capture the historic flight of 4 Slings in formation. Although the light was poor, the pilots had a great deal of fun flying the Slings in close formation over some beautiful Gauteng

ZU-JVL, Johan Van Leeuwen’s Sling built by Michelle Leuch flew for the first time on Thursday afternoon, 13 January 2011. Although some snags had to be resolved before the first flight, save for a few minutes off radio communication breakdown, ZU-JVL flew like a dream on her first flight. Following initial flights from the beautifully

From 26 to 29 November 2010 The Airplane Factory’s demonstration airplane, ZU-TAE, appeared on the roof of the Hyde Park shopping centre on Jan Smuts Avenue at the Joburg Food Wine Design Fair. Set on wood chips amongst SA’s finest culinary and design delights, she created quite a stir. The most regular question asked was,

The first Sling built from kit by a customer of The Airplane Factory took to the air for the first time on 1 November 2010. ZU-MDK was built, with great patience and forgiveness, by Michiel de Koker, The Airplane Factory’s first kit builder. Luckily Michiel is a large scale radio control model aficionado who was

On Saturday 25 October 2010 The Airplane Factory celebrated not only its arrival at the Tedderfield Airpark, but also the first flights of the first two Sling aircraft built using its production facility. ZU-NRC, purchased by Andrew Lane, flew at approximately 10h00, and ZU-TAE, the Airplane Factory replacement aircraft, flew just before sunset the same

The Airplane Factory has moved to Tedderfield Air Park and is about to launch 3 new Slings into the sky. Please join The Airplane Factory team for our hangar wetting party at 18h00 on Saturday 23 October 2010. VenueHangar 7 Tedderfield Air Park, Tedderfield Agricultural Holdings, Johannesburg SouthGPS co-ordinates – S26 21 02.3 E027 57

The Airplane Factory family is now fully settled in its new home at the Tedderfield Airpark, Johannesburg South. More importantly, the full Sling production process has been settled, the written Manual of Procedures for production is almost finalized and the four aircraft built in developing the most efficient production processes are about to fly. The

During November 2009 James confounded his family’s doubts about the wisdom of engaging in an aircraft development and manufacturing business by undertaking not to cut his hair until The Airplane Factory had delivered three aircraft. He is standing by the undertaking, as is apparent from the developments evidenced in the photos below.

Since the loss of the round the world production prototype Sling on 13 February 2010, The Airplane Factory has focused chiefly on three things. The first is the static re-testing of every single component of the Sling, partly for confirmation purposes, but mostly so as to increase the approved aircraft MAUW from 600kg to 700kg.

Joseph Straka, founder and CEO of Stratos 07, the Czech Republic registered company which manufacturers the Magnum ballistic parachutes which the Sling is designed to incorporate, visited The Airplane Factory. Joseph’s generosity in providing a free parachute and rocket for testing purposes facilitated the testing of the modified ballistic parachute fitting arrangements. Stratos parachutes have,