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Sunday, April 8, 2012

Breezy Aircraft

Breezy Aircraft

Back in the day, if you wanted to have fun flying, you found an old Super Cub or Champ and took to the sky. Airport coffee shops were the rage, and were well attended on weekends. Three Chicago-area pilots, doing corporate flying in Twin Beeches, decided that there had to be some way to squeeze more fun out of flying. Most private pilots were happy just to log a few hours every weekend, but Charles Roloff, Carl Unger, and Bob Liposky had something more extreme in mind. That is how they invented the Breezy aircraft.

A friend of theirs had a pair of wings from a crashed Piper PA-12. They scrounged a tail section and a nose wheel fork from elsewhere. Unger was an expert welder so they set about building an airframe to connect the parts together. With the money saved by scrounging, they bought a new Continental C90 engine with a special pusher crank and bolted it behind the wing. The airframe was a simple truss, uncomplicated by the need to enclose the passengers and systems. Everything bolted to the outside, and the pilot perched on the nose.

They flew it all over the mid-west, having a blast and raising eyebrows everywhere they went. Someone asked them if it was a little breezy sitting out in the open, and the name "Breezy" stuck. At the 1965 Rockford EAA fly-in they introduced the aircraft to the public. The Breezy spent the entire weekend giving rides to enthusiastic passengers. After returning from the fly-in, they were surprised by the large volume of mail asking for plans from which to build a Breezy. They hadn't drawn any plans when building the plane, so they reverse-engineered a set. Since then they have sold over 1000 copies of the simple drawings.

Although the Breezy aircraft had outstanding performance for its power, some thought that it could be improved. The folks at Yakima Aerosport decided to take a run at it. They were already building an improved version of the Piper PA18 Super Cub using Dakota Cub's slotted wing. It made a big improvement in the STOL performance of the Super Cub, so it was natural to assume that it would do the same for a "Super Breezy."

Equipped with a 180HP Lycoming engine, the Super Breezy has take-off and landing performance just short of a helicopter's. Piloted from the back seat, the passenger sits on the nose of the Super Breezy enjoying a fishbowl view of the sky and earth. Everyone who flies in it comes back to earth with a desire to own one and repeat the experience as many times as possible.

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