Risen — The Master of Efficiency

Airplane design embodies a wide range of variables even before you consider how it is you’re going to build, sell, service and otherwise support the love child of your aeronautical genius. High on the list: You have to decide what it’s going to do, what is the main mission? To be a delightful handling device for pure aerial fun? To haul the whole family on trips?

Most designers choose the little-bit-of-everything path and, when they’re good, they’re able to balance contradictory requirements exactly right. You can choose extreme stability at the cost of maneuverability. You can trade load hauling and cabin space for performance. You can get performance back with a lot of power only to trade away efficiency and payload. There’s no free meatball sandwich down at the deli.

Much of the time, these design constraints are self-inflicted—you work around a perceived set of goalposts—though sometimes they’re even measured by experience or market survey. But your sandbox is relatively well defined. Sometimes the rules dictate those dimensions for you, as in the case of traditional Light Sport Aircraft (LSA), which are limited by weight, stall speed and absolute speeds. That’s why so many airplanes designed to the LSA spec are so similar—you really can’t meet all the specs with a wide range of configurations. There are outliers, sure, but the vast majority of the successful LSAs are more alike than different.

And Then There’s…

Into this Euro-centric mix appears the Risen. Obviously it’s not an LSA—the retractable landing gear, constant-speed prop and eye-popping performance put it out of that category. At least for now. Should MOSAIC become real, the Risen would fit right in even in terms of the stall speed. It would be one of the sleekest, most efficient entrants in MOSAIC, and the way the company has structured its builder-assist program (more later) suggests it could make the leap to series production relatively easily. (That sound you hear is the nearest production engineer groaning at this rash simplification.)

Back to our premise, then. It doesn’t take more than a minute walking around the Risen, spec sheet in hand, to appreciate where Alberto Porto put his design emphasis. It’s on speed with efficiency. How much so? With a 100-hp Rotax 912 iS up front driving a two-blade, constant-speed prop, the Risen is said to cruise at 162 knots true (KTAS) at 9000 feet MSL using 75% power and consuming a mere 3.7 gph of 100LL or autogas. That’s within 10 knots of a Van’s RV-7A that has 80% more power. (That sound you hear is the nearest RV-7A owner saying but but but cabin size and wing area.)

Porto Aviation began life working on self-launching sailplanes and you can’t help but see those design influences in the Risen. It’s all composite, of course, mostly carbon fiber, with very smooth surfaces. Taken in profile view, the Risen’s long canopy presents something of an optical illusion, but the pilot and passenger sit just near the wing’s mid-chord with the leading edge of the canopy actually overhanging the Rotax’s ring-style engine mount. Think of a modern front-engine car whose powerplant is stuffed well back into the firewall for weight distribution.

That canopy, by the way, has a novel opening system. Because it’s a big piece of “glass,” it’s fairly heavy, so the Risen uses an electric lift. You have a fob-like remote control that raises the canopy to the open position once you’ve released the two mechanical latches on each sidewall. Slowly, the canopy hums open and you hop in. Close it with a big rocker switch on the instrument panel. You can physically disconnect the canopy from the lift mechanism in case you need to get out and the airplane has lost all electrical power. If the battery goes dead while you’re outside, you’ll need to connect it for a recharge before you even get in.

Now walk around the front and you’ll see some other ways Porto finessed this kind of speed out of 100 hp. The cowling is closely wrapped around the small Rotax but swells gently all the way back to the cabin, whose interior width dimension is said to be 48 inches. The coolant radiator is a bottom feeder, in typical Rotax form, and there are small additional ducts for the intake air, oil cooler and cylinder-base cooling. You don’t have to have your tape measure in hand to notice they aren’t large. Reducing wetted area and cooling drag as much as possible is the goal here.

Legging It

Folding the landing gear during flight is another way to buy efficiency. In the Risen, the tricycle landing gear, made of molded carbon fiber, folds neatly into the belly using a trio of electrically driven jackscrews. Think of the systems used for flaps in a lot of homebuilts. Three separate electric motors are governed by microswitches that stop the gear when they reach either fully down or completely retracted. There are no uplocks. There are logic circuits to control the panel lights—green for down, red for up—and manage power when the jackscrews reach their travel limits.

Most gear systems have some form of redundancy, and so does the Risen’s. First of all, any single microswitch only manages the gear in one direction for each leg—a single switch failure won’t disable the whole set. And then there’s a backup system. A completely separate electrical circuit can provide power directly from the battery to each jackscrew to drive it to the down position. When it reaches the limit, the jackscrew motor will bind and pull more current that the breakers are rated for, popping them and signifying that the gear is as far down as it’s going to get.

Careful use of fixed fairings allows the gear to be completely enclosed in the fuselage when retracted without the need for extra gear doors or systems. One downside is that the gear has quite low extension and retraction speeds—you must be at 70 KIAS or below to extend or retract the gear and can fly as fast as 76 KIAS once the gear is down. The limits are primarily to protect the fairings and, secondarily, to take some load off the actuators. These combine with similarly low flap speeds—86 KIAS max for partial flaps (used for takeoff) and 70 KIAS for full flaps—to make speed management fairly critical in certain phases of flight.

One advantage of the large, slotted Fowler flaps is a generous reduction in stall speed from about 52 KIAS clean to 38 KIAS full flaps, according to the company. As with the gear, the flaps are electrically operated via a control panel on the center console. There are four preselected settings—up, takeoff, landing and full—but you can also switch over to manual mode and set the flaps anywhere between full up and down. (Normal landings are done in the landing setting but extra drag may be useful with full flaps for certain circumstances; think of this like an early Cessna 150 with 40° of flaps, which you wouldn’t normally use unless you arrived high and hot.) Similar preselection thinking lives inside the Flybox propeller controller, which can work in constant-speed mode or you can put it in manual and increment prop pitch with a small toggle switch.

Carbon Paneling

All of these goodies reside in a well-organized flight deck. The fuel selector is prominent beneath your right wrist, with the parking brake control just to the right. The T-handle throttle feels substantial and comes with a pull-to-release lock, which keeps it from creeping away from your desired setting. Just ahead is the prop controller, switches for exterior lights and then the panel with the gear switch, function lights and pullable breakers for the primary circuit—everything you need to know about the gear is right there, in plain view.

Builder Mark Jardini opted for a single Dynon HDX EFIS and engine monitor, the 10-inch display located in front of the pilot. A second screen could be mounted in front of the passenger seat for redundancy, but Jardini felt that for a VFR-only airplane (his choice) a single screen was fine. He has provisions for an iPad to mount on the right.

The Risen has conventional sticks at each seat and, for the most part, the control system is also conventional by sailplane standards—pushrods operate the ailerons and the pitch control is via pushrod back to a control mixer for the V-tail. Here’s where some of the magic happens, as it does for all V-tail aircraft. Rudder and pitch inputs are combined to determine proper deflection of the elevator/rudder surfaces on the tail. (Beech called them “ruddervators” on the Bonanza, which seems appropriate here as well.) Twin trim tabs combine for pitch and yaw trim.

About the Builder

This Risen was built by Mark Jardini, based at Stark’s Twin Oaks Airpark (7S3) in Hillsboro, Oregon. (Yeah, that’s my home field.) We sat down over lunch and he told me the story.

“After about 30 years, I’d wrung everything out of soaring that I was capable of doing. And I decided to build an RV-12, which I completed and then flew it for about a year, taking some longer trips in it—to California from my base in Western Oregon. It’s a great aircraft but I think it pushes the envelope for cross-country work. So I saw the Risen in a video and thought, ‘That’s a great aircraft.’ One thing led to another, so I decided to sell the RV-12 and build the Risen mainly because it was much faster.”

Unlike the RV-12, which Jardini built in his spare time on weekends and evenings, the Risen was built at the factory in Italy. “The plan is to come early in the process for a four-week block and then come again later for another four-week block to complete the airplane,” Jardini says. “My build was a little unusual in that it happened during COVID, so the factory was having supply issues. Things like getting the correct steel for the engine mount. So not all of the tasks were able to be completed.” Reportedly, the factory, in the city of Cremella—about 20 miles north of Milan in the Italian Lake District or Regione dei Laghi—has overcome those obstacles. Incidentally, Risen has a facility at the Voghera Rivanazzano Airport (LILH) for final assembly and test flying but sources the fuselage from a factory in Slovenia.

Among the tasks Jardini was able to complete was assisting with the basic wing layups and getting a feel for the epoxy resin and the carbon-fiber composites. Like many of the builder-assist programs, Risen sets it up so the builder gets a taste of each major discipline even if he doesn’t actually have to build every rib, for example. “I feel like my exposure at that stage of the build, as well as being able to see other Risens being built and test flown, gave me a really good grounding on how it all goes together,” Jardini says.

The builder is generally handed participation in key airframe and some systems tasks, though the firewall-forward installation and the avionics are completed without the builder’s participation. “When they’re ready for the avionics, they load the airplane onto a trailer and take it to the shop where one guy does most of the work,” says Jardini. Very Italian.

Getting It Home

The obvious shortcoming of building the airplane in Europe is getting it home to the States. You could put it in a box and wait or, as Jardini did, participate in flying it across. “I met the factory pilot in Newfoundland. We made it from there to Portland in three days. It was under temporary Italian registration with the understanding that once it landed in the U.S. it had to stay put until I had a local DAR inspect it and approve the paperwork,” says Jardini. He did have his build log and by then the airplane had completed enough time in Europe to be through its Phase I flight test period. Once signed off in the States, Jardini had to reenter an abbreviated Phase I flight test for 5 hours, after which he could release it into Phase II.

Flying the Risen

Enough teasing the airplane. Let’s go fly. Jardini and I met on a beautiful sunny day in Oregon. I was happy to take the right seat. You get in over the leading edge of the wing, shinny up and with a bit of flexibility you might be able to avoid stepping on the seat cushions. Let yourself down into a comfortable cabin with moderately reclined seat backs and plenty of legroom. Jardini’s airplane, serial number 23, was fitted for him, though later airplanes have adjustable rudder pedals for different pilots.

Sitting on the ground, visibility over the nose seems fine and the wing is small enough that you have good visibility ahead of it to see downward.

Start-up is traditional Rotax 912 iS, checking the twin ECUs and doing the normal checklist things. There’s an extra check to make sure the prop-pitch controller is working. Secure the canopy—double-check those cinching latches at your elbows—set flaps for takeoff and you’re ready.

The day Jardini and I flew, we had full fuel. Given his airplane’s empty weight at 750 pounds that would put us about 60 pounds under max gross, which is 1323 pounds. It was pretty close to a standard day in terms of temperature and our field is near sea level.

Initial acceleration is brisk but not exactly eye-widening—it is just 100 hp, after all—and Jardini appeared to have no difficulty keeping the nose on the centerline. The Risen indicated it was ready to fly by 55–60 KIAS by feeling a bit light on the wheels. A slight rotation and we were off. Jardini got the gear stowed and the flaps up before handing over control.

While the book says the best rate-of-climb speed is 86 KIAS, we’d already pushed over to 90 KIAS and had pulled the prop back slightly to 5400 rpm (max is 5800). This netted us 1000 fpm initially, gradually trailing off as we climbed. Jardini normally commits a cruise climb at full throttle and 5200 or 5300 rpm, producing 400 fpm but at 120 KIAS, which is good for forward visibility and to help keep engine temps under control.

Indeed, the cooling margins on oil appear to be relatively thin. We had to be careful of keeping enough air flowing through the cowling for the Rotax to be happy. Get it too slow and the oil temp would venture into the yellow arc; the coolant temp did not. Is this an artifact of the “point design” of the airplane (meaning it has one overarching emphasis), that is, to emphasize speed and performance? No doubt that’s an influence here.

We ambled up to 6500 feet for a couple of cruise checks. At the rated 75% power, Jardini’s Risen was legitimately capable of 160 KTAS on 4.7 gph. All temps and pressures were fine at this cruise speed. More normally, he pulls back a bit—with full throttle, the prop set for an engine speed of 4800 rpm—and sees 150 KTAS on 3.5 gph, a figure we verified at altitude. Jardini usually cruises at 7000 to 9000 feet, where the slick Risen makes the most of its aerodynamic cleanliness.

If the Risen looks a bit like a sailplane from some angles, you might think it has sailplane-like handling qualities. It does and it doesn’t. Generally, the Risen feels like a conventional, albeit very slick, airplane. The airplane responds to pilot inputs predictably and is nicely positive and easy to position on task. Ask for a 20° bank and you can nail it easily. Ask for a 10° change in pitch and it’s easy to get right.

While the Risen isn’t quite as trim stable in pitch—meaning it doesn’t quickly snap back to your trimmed airspeed if you pitch away from it—as some larger airplanes, it will return to trimmed speed after a few lazy phugoids. Pitch forces are on the light side but not difficult to adjust to. It’s neutrally roll stable—select a bank angle and it’ll hold that, no tendency I could see to wrap up. Changes with power are easily managed.

Can you tell it has a V-tail from the pilot’s perspective? Not really. The Risen has good yaw stability and no discernible pitch/yaw coupling. It does benefit from having generously sized fixed surfaces back there. Jardini and I flew on a smooth morning, so I can’t say how it does in turbulence. He says it doesn’t have any bad habits but also admits he doesn’t go looking for bumpy air—avoids it assiduously, in fact.

Bringing It Back

Probably the most challenging part of flying the Risen is getting it slowed down for the very modest flap and gear speeds. Thankfully the Rotax, with its liquid-cooled heads, is tolerant of pulling the power well back in the descent; you’ll have to plan to be level for quite some time before the Risen decelerates sufficiently to drop gear and flaps. Arrive a bit hot to your local pattern and you’ll be chewing up air miles getting it down to speed. Jardini completed the landing with little apparent effort.

For his part, Jardini is happy with the airplane and glad to have built it. He’s fought some landing-gear issues, most recently ornery limit switches that prevented the right main gear from retracting. But the gear did go down when asked. He’s appreciative of the Risen’s speed and efficiency, which translates into long legs without having to carry a massive amount of fuel. “Several of my recent trips could be made nonstop in the Risen where it would have required a stop in the RV-12,” Jardini says.

Jardini has just under $200K in the plane, which represents his status as an early adopter but also shows how component costs have increased in the last few years. Today’s 912 iS-powered Risen starts at €249,500 with a generous list of included items, such as paint, interior, basic avionics, propeller, wheels, brakes and training package.

Worth it? “I get asked questions all the time,” Jardini says, nodding in the affirmative. “People want to know what it is, where it was built, how fast it goes.” Jardini is also appreciative of the factory’s support. He’s able to keep in touch with Alberto Porto easily and receives a lot of support from the factory. That’s probably as it should be for a sporty two-place Experimental that’ll take a $300K-plus investment to bring home—plus you need to account for travel to the factory twice and the costs of bringing the finished product home from Italy. The payback is a unique and uniquely efficient traveling airplane that stands out everywhere it goes. Mission statement enough?