A good friend owns one. The Lancair Legacy is in the experimental category, being built from a kit. Which means, it’s not ‘FAA Certified’. It’s a small 2-seater, with just enough room for an overnight bag behind the pilot’s seats. It’s like a 2-seat sports car, with wings! You wear it!! It’s a very tight fit in the 2-seat cockpit. The engine is a 6- cylinder Continental IO-550, which puts out 310Hp at 2,700RPM, and it cruises at 276 mph!! It only weights 2,200#. So, it has a high thrust to weight ratio. The performance is impressive!
It was a beautiful day to fly here, after many, many weeks of unrelenting rain. Ugh. So glad that is over! On the way to Camarillo, I was in the right seat, just watching what my friend Henry was doing in the left seat, as this was my first time in this airplane. After takeoff, and upon reaching our cruise altitude, 4,000’, he turned on the autopilot and let it do the flying.
We landed at Camarillo and waited for a group of friends to arrive, a few at a time, in their various airplanes. We ordered lunch and waited and watched. It was a beautiful day to be outside, with no rain! Eventually about 15 other pilot friends had arrived, and it was a lively, jovial crowd. The food and service are good at the Waypoint Café.
After a leisurely lunch and some socializing, we all left to fly back. There was actually a line of aircraft waiting to take off. Camarillo is a busy one-runway airport, bult back in the early 1940’s during WWII as an Army Training base for Air Corp Cadets. It has now created nearly 2,000 jobs and contributes nearly $230 million annually to the local economy.
