The Pipistrel Spider is a Slovenian ultralight trike, designed and produced by Pipistrel of Ajdovščina. The aircraft is supplied as a kit for amateur construction or as a complete ready-to-fly-aircraft.Purdy, Don: AeroCrafter - Homebuilt Aircraft Sourcebook, Fifth Edition, page 222. BAI Communications, 15 July 1998.
The Spider was sold in Europe by Flight Team UG & Company AG of Ippesheim, Germany and was sometimes called the Flight Team Spider.Bayerl, Robby; Martin Berkemeier; et al: World Directory of Leisure Aviation 2011-12, page 211. WDLA UK, Lancaster UK, 2011. ISSN 1368-485X
By October 2018 it was listed as a "legacy" product and production had ended.
Design and development The aircraft was designed to comply with the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale microlight category, including the category's maximum gross weight of . The aircraft has a maximum gross weight of . It features a cable-braced hang glider-style high-wing, weight-shift controls, a two-seats-in-tandem open cockpit with an optional cockpit fairing, tricycle landing gear with wheel pants and a single engine in pusher configuration.
The aircraft is made from composites and steel tubing, with its double surface wing covered in Dacron sailcloth. A number of different wings can be fitted to the basic carriage, but typically a span wing is supported by a single tube-type kingpost and uses an "A" frame weight-shift control bar. The powerplant is a twin cylinder, air-cooled, two-stroke, dual-ignition Rotax 503 or the twin cylinder, liquid-cooled, two-stroke, dual-ignition Rotax 582 engine. The aircraft has an empty weight of and a gross weight of , giving a useful load of . With full fuel of the payload is .
The standard day, sea level, no wind, take off and landing roll with a engine is .
The manufacturer estimates the construction time from the supplied kit as 150 hours.
Operational history By 1998 the company reported that 250 kits had been sold were flying.
Specifications (Spider)
References
External links Official website archive page on archive.org Official Spider photo gallery archive