The Airplane Factory

General information

The Airplane Factory is a Johannesburg based business focusing on the development and manufacture of high quality, high utility aircraft.

The Airplane Factory's first aircraft, the Sling, is a competitively priced high all round performance aluminium light sport aircraft which can be purchased ready to fly or as a homebuild kit.

For the adventure of it, and also to prove the aircraft to themselves and the world, during July and August 2009, Mike Blyth and James Pitman, the company’s founders, flew the production prototype Sling around the world via EAA Oshkosh, the world’s largest airshow. The aircraft performed flawlessly, flying numerous legs over 2 000nm (3 600 km) over the world’s oceans, east to west and with almost the entire route in the ITCZ. The only differences between the round the world aircraft and the standard production Sling were additional fuel tanks in the wings and an additional 15 layers of glass-fibre in the undercarriage.

The Airplane Factory is based at Tedderfield Airpark in the south of Johannesburg, an ideal venue for aircraft development, manufacture and testing. The employment complement has been substantially strengthened and production processes for the Sling finalized while development work on additional aircraft has been completed.

Directors:

Mike Blyth
James Pitman
Andrew Pitman