Month: August 2014

Recently I had the opportunity to visit some Shadow owners in England (as I was en-route to the Skyleader factory in the Czech Republic).

I visited Tim Walker near Manchester who is building one of the last wide-body Streak kits to come out of the CFM factory. It’s fitted with a 75hp Rotax 618 engine, carbon-composite main landing gear and a digital cockpit display. It should be exciting to fly.

Since I hope to upgrade some components of my 1988 CFM Shadow microlight (e.g. main landing gear, cooling shroud, etc), I was pleased to see beneath the surface of his Streak, get close-up photos of construction details and make some measurements.

It was neat to spend time with yet another enthusiastic Shadow owner. I hope that Tim will be flying his Streak soon.

What a surprise? When I was in Shadow Flight Centre’s hangar at Old Sarum airfield, I spotted G-MVAC hiding beneath its covers.

This is the very Shadow that I have used for the main header photo on my Fly Micro website.

I love MVAC’s simple colour scheme, with yellow and grey fuselage stripes. Maybe I’ll paint my Shadow in these colours?

 

My personal project is restoring a 1988 2-seat CFM Shadow microlight. Recently, as I was en-route to the Skyleader factory in the Czech Republic, I had the opportunity to visit some Shadow owners in UK.

One stop was at the iconic Shadow Flight Centre near Salisbury. Fiona Luckhurst and Raymond Proost host a myriad of C-D and Streak variants in their hangar at the Old Sarum airfield. They have built up a vast knowledge of the CFM Shadow series, having operated a flight school for many years and repaired/maintained a lot of these classic microlights.

Raymond was kind enough to show me some of their unique equipment. The ‘historic’ red boom jig (for accurately making replacement Shadow or Streak booms) allowed me to definitively solve the mystery of the correct tailplane incidences on the 582-powered Shadow D-D and Streak models. Raymond also has a nifty pattern for getting the nose leg wires correct. I inspected a brand-new Crosbie undercarriage – it was reassuring to find that the mods I have done to strengthen the undercarriage of my Shadow in New Zealand are along very similar lines.