Class of ’86: How 1986 Transformed the Modern Kit Building Industry

Forty years ago this year, Chris Heintz’s CH701 first flew. That alone would be reason enough for a celebration. The 701 is one of the most consequential designs in the history of experimental aviation — a short-takeoff utility airframe that did exactly what it set out to do, kept doing, and never needed reinventing. Chris Heintz passed away in 2021, and the work he started in a two-car garage in Ontario in 1974 is now carried forward by his sons — Sebastien at Zenith Aircraft Company in Mexico, MO, and his brothers at Matt, Michael, and Nick at Zenair in Canada. The homebuilding community owes the Heintz family a great deal, and KITPLANES has said so before. We say it again here.

What I want to do in this column, alongside that tribute, is widen the lens. Because the 701 didn’t arrive in a vacuum. It arrived in a remarkable twelve-month window — late 1985 through the close of 1986 — that, in retrospect, looks like the inflection point for the entire modern kit plane industry. The 701 was part of a cohort. Honoring the airplane means honoring the moment it belongs to.

Look at what else happened in those twelve months. The Glasair II shipped. The Glasair III followed: 300 hp, 265-knot cruise. Chris Heintz’s CH701 first flew and defined what STOL would mean for the next four decades. The RANS S-7 Courier hit the market in April at $9,895 with a quoted 150-hour build. Lancair was just on the runway. KITPLANES itself had been on the newsstand for eighteen months. And in December, Burt Rutan’s Voyager left Edwards and came back nine days later having flown around the planet without stopping.

In that same year, Cessna stopped building piston singles. Stopped. All of them.

That is the inflection — the whole twelve-month window. Within it, three things converged: the certified industry vacated the entry-level market, the second-generation kit designs landed to fill the gap, and a regulatory-economic vacuum became a permanent market structure. Everything we cover now — MOSAIC, the Sonex revival we chronicle in this issue, the entire backcountry STOL subculture, the Van’s order book, the European LSAs that turned up at Paradise City this spring — descends from decisions made by a handful of small companies, the Heintz family prominent among them, in that window.

Three design philosophies came out of it that are still running the industry.

The kit company’s product is labor, not parts

Before 1986, “kit” meant a box of materials and a set of plans. Glasair’s pre-molded composite halves and Zenith’s pre-drilled rivet holes changed the unit economics. The thing being sold was no longer the airframe — it was the hours subtracted from the build. RANS quoting a 150-hour S-7 build wasn’t marketing copy; it was the actual deliverable. Van’s match-hole tooling, Sling’s pre-bent skins, and every quick-build option on every spec sheet today is running this same playbook. Chris Heintz was running it in 1986.

Mission-specific replaces do-everything

The certified industry’s design assumption was that a 172 Skyhawk or a Cherokee 140 should do training, cross-country, and weekend hundred-dollar hamburgers acceptably well, all off well-kept airport runways. The 1986 cohort changed that. The CH 701 is a STOL airplane and admits to nothing else, and that single-minded clarity is exactly why it is still in production forty years later. The Glasair III is a speed airplane and admits to nothing else. The S-7 is a slow, honest tandem and admits to nothing else. Builders stopped asking “what’s the best airplane” and started asking “best at what.” That shift became prominent in 1986.

The composite/metal split is permanent — and that’s fine

Glasair and Lancair went composite, which was trending at that time. Zenith and the soon-to-arrive Van’s RV-6 stayed with metal. Both tracks proved out and built lasting communities. The argument that one method would win — which dominated the trade press in the late eighties — turned out to be wrong in a useful way. The industry didn’t converge. It bifurcated, and both branches grew. Worth saying out loud in 2026, because the carbon-versus-aluminum debate is back in comments today. Some argue it was settled forty years ago.

The economic context lives in the sidebar, below, but the headline number belongs in the column: FAA certificated general aviation aircraft production dropped from roughly 18,000 units in 1978 to about 4,000 in 1986 and would bottom at 928 in 1994. A 95 percent collapse. Product liability did most of the damage; GARA—the General Aviation Revitalization Act—wouldn’t pass until August 1994. Meanwhile FAA Part 103 had legalized true ultralights in 1982, and by the end of 1985 the FAA rolls already showed 10,778 active amateur-built Experimentals. By the mid-nineties, kit aircraft were outselling factory-built GA five to one.

That’s the gap the class of 1986 filled. It was more of a market substitution than a hobby boom. The kit industry emerged in large part because of the certified collapse, and the separation has been permanent. The designers who built the airplanes that filled that gap — Chris Heintz, Tom Hamilton, Lance Neibauer, Randy Schlitter, Burt Rutan — built more than airframes. They built an industry.

So happy fortieth to the CH 701, and to the Heintz family that gave it to us and continues to steward it. 

Forty years on, airplanes that defined the kit industry are still the airplanes defining the kit industry. That’s a remarkable run. The CH701 is one of the airplanes that made it possible.

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This column first appeared in the 2026 August Issue of KITPLANES magazine.