Welcome to www.contrail.ch, my website about my passion for flying. You can find information here about my kitplane project, my flying excursions and other flying related topics. I have decided to maintain this website in English to make it accessible to a wider audience. Some information is however available in both English and German, and a few items are in German only. Please understand that not all information can be provided in both languages.

My passion for flying started with building model airplane. The first ones were just basic gliders with no radio control, the fancier ones of these had a fuse to make them land after a while in case they caught some thermals. Then at the age of 12 or thirteen one of our neighbors lent us an old single channel pulse remote control system, which could only control the rudder. We converted one of our old gliders to carry this system, but the planes were difficult to control. Later my parents bought a proper RC set for my brother and myself, and we built a number of model aircraft with it. 

That was the time when Burt Rutan came up with his early designs, such as the VariViggen and the VariEze, so we converted one of our early gliders (Kö-C) into a canard by just turning around the wing and the horizontal stabiliser on the fuselage, moving the vertical stabiliser to the other end and adding weight to get a proper centre of gravity. It flew fantastically, and truly didn’t stall. 

In 1977 at the age of 16 I started flying gliders. At that time we did our basic training on the Schleicher Ka-4 Rhönlerche, a wood / tube and fabric glider which is similar in design to a Piper Cub, but without an engine. The performance of the Rhönlerche was marginal from today’s point of view, with a best glide of 18 and a minimum sink of more than 1 m/s. The picture above of a Rhönlerche dates from around that time.

Unfortunately I had to stop flying after only four years for health reasons. I promised myself however that one day I would fly again, build myself a plane and go and see the world with it (or at least part of it).

In 1998 we went on holidays to the US and passed Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where the Experimental Aviation Association EAA is based and where their annual fly-in AirVenture takes pace. We were too early for AirVenture, but visited the EAA Museum, which re-ignited my wish to fly again. We even changed our tour plan around the Great Lakes to return three weeks later for AirVenture, where my wife and I spent countless hours looking at kitplanes.

In 2001 we went back to Oshkosh, this time better prepared and eager to learn as much as possible about kitbuilding. I attended many workshops and collected a lot of material on potential kits, even though I still had no chance to get medical.

A few weeks after returning from Oshkosh I had my annual health check and my doctor informed me that, due to some advances in surgery, he’d recommend I get my heart defect corrected, as the risk of the operation had now become very small. So after having been grounded for more than 20 years, and having just returned from Oshkosh I realised that I might be able to regain a medical certificate and to resume flying.

Through the winter of 2001/2002 I did my PPL theory course and my radio licence (that was before language proficiency rules), went through heart surgery and go my Class 2 medical. In April 2002 i started taking flying lessons, soloing only five weeks later after my 12th lesson with a total of 7:48 hours and 32 landings. Even though I had only flown gliders for four years between 1977 and 1980, with only 20 hours and 162 flights and most of them on the Rhönlerche, it felt like I had never stopped flying.

After flying for a few years I decided in 2006 that it is time to proceed with the next step, which is building my own plane. It was still a dream at that time, as I didn’t have the funds for the project, but then my friend and co-worker Rolf proposed to join the project. So all of a sudden the dream project turned into a true project. This web site documents all aspects of that project, including kit selection, kit building and flying of course.

I finished building the plane in August 2010, when the first flight took place. Since then I have flown it for around 450 hours (block time, 1. January 2020), visiting a number of countries (Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden and Italy).

The airport where my SportCruiser is based is called Lommis (LSZT). It is located in Switzerland at 47º 31¨28´ North and 9º 00¨ 11´ East, at an altitude of 1539 ft / 469 m. It is operated by Motorfluggruppe Thurgau (www.mfgt.ch), of which I am a member.