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This article is from the Aviation Aerobatics FAQ, by Dr. Guenther Eichhorn with numerous contributions by others.

04 Aerobatic Airplanes

First I want to emphasize that you should do aerobatics only in
airplanes that are approved for aerobatics. It is potential suicide
to try aerobatics in any other airplane. Other planes are not
stressed for this type of maneuvering and they WILL break. Please
don't do it!

A list of aerobatic airplanes is available at
http://acro.harvard.edu/IAC/acro_planes.html with a summary of their
features. If you know any of the numbers that are missing, or know of
any other aerobatic airplane (not one-of-a-kind planes though) please
let me know about it.

Which aerobatic plane to use is almost a religious question, but here
are some pointers: The most common aerobatic planes for beginners are
probably:

* Citabria
* Decathlon
* C-150 Aerobat

For more advanced aerobatics the most popular trainer is probably the
Pitts S-2A or Pitts S-2B. Most other higher performance aerobatic
planes are experimental and cannot be used for regular flight
instruction.

Now on which trainer should you get started? It depends on various
things, not the least on the amount of money that you want to spend.
Here are some rough figures for hourly rates:

* Citabria: $60 - $90
* Decathlon: $70 - $120
* C-150 Aerobat: $50 - $80
* Pitts S-2A: $130 - $200
* Pitts S-2B: $160 - $220

It obviously is much less costly to get started in a Citabria or a
Decathlon than in a Pitts. And both are good enough to teach the
basics of aerobatics. The C-150 Aerobat is very limited in the type
of aerobatics it can do. It seems to be a consensus on the IAC e-mail
list that it makes sense to get started in one of these trainers and
then move up to a Pitts to work on more advanced aerobatics.

 

Continue to:

• prev: 03 Aerobatics Books
• Index
• next: 05 Basic Aerobatics Figures

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