Windscreen Blowout

Tell us about your aircraft, the Aeropract.

Yeah, it's a 2016 Ukrainian-made Aeropract.

It's the A22LS, which is a special light sport here in the United States.

Okay.

It has a Rotax 912 ULS.

It's a two-seater.

Its gross weight, of course, is 1,320 pounds just for light sport.

Empty weight, it's about 720 pounds empty.

So to put that into perspective, it weighs almost as much as my last motorcycle.

You've got your plane tricked out with multiple cameras and you host a YouTube channel.

I do.

You know, it's funny about that, though, because I don't always have cameras on.

Sometimes they're on and sometimes they're not.

Okay.

I was in Oshkosh back this past July and I found a little turbine wind vortex generator that powers the Insta 360 that sits out on the wing strut.

Yeah.

So typically what happens is while we're out flying, I link the Insta360 to my phone, hand my phone to my wife, and I just tell her if anything interesting happens, you know, or you think there's something down there you want to see, hit the record button and take a look.

So generally you only get about 45 minutes to an hour out of the battery on the Insta, so we don't get a lot of footage out of it typically.

But having just bought this little contraption, I thought, well, this is the perfect, it's really the first opportunity that we got to use it and try it out.

before we did our run up at the end of the runway, we just turned it on and let it run.

So it was running the whole time and we didn't have to worry about power.

So if it hadn't been for that, we may or may not have caught that whole thing on video, at least from the outside.

And that is one of the many things that is really remarkable about this flight, which we're going to talk about in just a second.

But I've got the advantage of having seen the multi-camera accounting of the thing.

There is a real permanent record of what happened.