Homebuilt Aircraft Directory 2022

Here we are again with our annual “directory” of homebuilt aircraft that are available as kits, plans or both. The 2022 Homebuilt Aircraft Directory has a few changes in format. The big one is the exclusion of all companies no longer in business from the printed version. There’s value in seeing some of the data about airplanes that you might find out in the wild but the list continued to grow and take up more pages. Pages that I’d rather use for other things. Fear not; the data is maintained on our website.

We have several ways of determining if a company is viable. Sometimes they tell us they’re not, but often it’s because there’s a history of no contact, no response and no signs of life. This year, five companies joined the non-active list: Dream Aircraft, Eklund Engineering, EU-WISH Aircraft, Flight Addictions and Howard Allmon. What’s more, a few designs for active companies have been retired, including the Great Plains Easy Eagle I, the Pro Composites Personal Cruiser, the RANS S-19 Venterra, the Sling 4, the Steen Great Lakes Sport Trainer, Composite-FX’s Mosquito Air and Mosquito EX3 designs and RotorX’s A600 Talon.

We have some additions from familiar companies: Aeroplane Manufactory’s Chinook SJ, Back Country Super Cubs’ Backcountry BOSS, Bandland’s F Series, the NX-Cub, SS, and X-Cub from CubCrafters, two new designs from IBIS, Just Aircraft’s SuperSTOL XL, Piuma Project’s Almerico, the Sling High Wing, the Sonex and Waiex High Wing models, the Sport Performance Panther LS, the Stratos 716X, the Thunderbird Aviation SNS-7 Hiperbipe, the Timber Tiger ST-L Ryan Replica, the Don Wolf W-11 Boredom Fighter, the Composite-FX Mosquito XE290, the RotorX Phoenix A600 Turbo and the Safari 500, which is back.

About that elephant in the room: Where’s the Van’s RV-15? After all, Sonex announced the two High Wing variants after Van’s teased the RV-15, so why isn’t it in here? Simple. Van’s has not confirmed much other than it’ll be a mostly metal, high-wing backcountry aircraft. No specs, not even speculative prices. Once we have them, we’ll share those with you and add the 15 to the guide.

As ever, the data in this guide can be found in a fuller form online. Access to this part of the site is free for a limited time—but is available year round to subscribers. Settle in and dream big!

Aircraft Buyer’s Guide Online Access

This year, the online Aircraft Buyer’s Guide follows the format we established a few years ago and provides many useful features for users. Among them is the ability to do side-by-side comparisons of more than one aircraft using various selection criteria. Unlimited access to the online Buyer’s Guide is free for our subscribers, but for a limited time only, we are offering non-subscribers a chance to look behind the curtain, so to speak.

Here’s how: Readers should visit our “Buyer’s Guide Access” intro offer and follow the on-screen prompts to gain access to the full database. While there, click around our site—your limited-time access to the Buyer’s Guide will also get you into the rest of the site and its amazing breadth and depth of content.