Seaplane Take 2

In my obsessive-compulsive style I came home from my first seaplane ride and started researching about similar designs and came upon the Sea Rey. It is very close to the Aventura II in many ways but has been around longer and is more refined. Also there are about 350 of them flying vs. about 150 Aventura II's. Another 150 or so kits have been sold so are assumedly in some stage of building. It is a bit surprising but when comparing apples and apples with similarly equipped airplanes, the cost of the two types is very close.

The refinements are in areas like real Stits fabric covering on the wings and tail feathers instead of pre-sewn sock-type coverings. The ailerons are controlled by torque tubes instead of Teleflex push-pull cables and they are balanced with counterweights. It just looks and feels and flies more like a real airplane and less like an ultralight. The low speed end of the performance envelope is virtually identical but the cleaner wing gives the Sea Rey an advantage of about 10 -15 mph on the top end. In an airplane this slow, that is a pretty substantial percentage. On the negative side, the covering process takes a couple of hundred hours vs. about 25 for the Aventura. The cockpit is a bit smaller but still an inch wider than a Cessna 172 and very comfortable. You lay back more in the seats.

A very nice advantage is that the Sea Rey has standard split canopy doors that slide open or shut even in flight vs. the Aventura's doors that must be either closed or removed prior to flight because they swing forward. I read one story of a Sea Rey adventure where a cabin cruiser went by in front of the plane on the water making a very large wake. They saw it coming and simply slid the doors closed before the wake came up over the bow and over the canopy like they were going through a car wash. An Aventura pilot with the doors off would have gotten soaked. So, there's a lot of little things to consider in airplane design.

Okay, so I noticed that Progressive Aerodyne, the manufacturer of the Sea Rey, happens to be right here in Orlando. I just had to take advantage of my good fortune of being right in the same city so I got up this morning, called over there and arranged for a tour. I met Kerry Richter who showed me around and told me lots of interesting things about the kits and the airplanes. There were several of them available to look at. Then he asked if I'd like to go fly! Would I ?!!! So off we went to the airstrip where yet two more Sea Reys sat in a hanger. There are about a half dozen others based at that strip. There are a whole bunch of these things based around Orlando! There is one on Dave Nixon's lake but until this week I didn't know what it was. We later stopped by the Apopka airport where Progressive Aerodyne plans to move by the end of the year, and went inside a large hanger to see three or four more! I lost count! That's a very good indicator that this is a good airplane.

We taxied out and I asked something about the decision to go with a tapered wing, which happens to be beautiful, especially when one gets a view of the planform of the airplane, such as when it's in a steep bank. Kerry phrased his answer in terms of “I thought that less mass at the tips would be better and visibility would be better...” etc., and I realized that I was sitting next to the designer of the plane! I hadn't put that together. He has about 6,000 hours, about 5,500 of which were in seaplanes and about 3,500 of which were in Sea Reys! This man really knows his airplane and has been working steadily at tweaking and improving it for years.

We took off and being as we were in Florida, there was a lake, a few ponds, and a canal very handily nearby. Kerry did a dramatic military-style banking approach and set her down on a smooth pond. Wow! I experienced that smooth water rush! Yeow!!! He demonstrated high speed step taxiing and some tight turns that would have flipped any conventional plane on floats. He took us over to a little canal and landed on it. It was a place that would be pretty much impossible to get to any other way except maybe by airboat. It was a tiny little strip of water. I was thinking as we settled into it how alien it would feel to be anywhere near it in any normal plane with wheels or any larger float plane or seaplane for that matter. But the little Sea Rey is like a magic carpet. It can go just about anywhere.

Then we popped over to Lake Apopka which was also very smooth this morning. He gave me the airplane and completely hands-off talked me through a landing. It was so easy and I greased the first one on with no problem at all. The second was a little sloppier but I did about a half dozen in a row. I just took off, climbed to fifty feet or so and then made another landing again and again across the lake. What a blast! We saw alligators all over the place. Around one bend there must have been about thirty of them all having a gator convention. Possibly it was a homeowners association meeting.

I got to fly it around a bit more and then drop the wheels, make a conventional traffic pattern behind a Cessna, and then land on the paved strip. I couldn't believe how I could just fly the thing. It is so stable and easy. Just a delightful little bird that delivers an absolutely fantastic combination of air and water sport all at the same time. The flying part makes it more fun than any boat and the boat part makes it more fun than other planes. There is just nothing like water flying. And this beautiful little plane delivers an awesome experience for the buck. I'm a big believer in the aesthetic tenet that form follows function and the Sea Rey gives an amazing breadth of functionality along with generous doses of visual poetry. I'm in love!