Flying the Carbon Cub on Floats

If ever we need a king in this country and someone put me in charge, somewhere on my to-do list would be getting rid of FAR 91.119. OK, so I wouldn't eliminate it, but I'd amend it so that people would just worry about it less. I've been in more discussions than I care to remember about what constitutes congested areas versus uncongested areas and what exactly is a settlement, anyway?

Over-thinking this is a cultural/geographic thing, I think. Pilots on the coasts tend to sweat it more than pilots in flyover country do and definitely more than seaplane or back-country pilots do. This occurred to me on a recent visit to CubCrafters in Yakima, Washington, where I spent a pleasant morning with Randy Lervold flying a float-equipped Carbon Cub off Rimrock Lake, west of Yakima. (Here's a video on the adventure.) Rimrock is a reservoir formed by the impoundment of the Tieton River, which flows from the west toward Yakima. It has a nice 2500-foot turf strip at the east end, naturally resurfaced by Mt. St. Helens in 1980, according to the state's description of it. In short, it's the perfect playground for an amphib. I'd come to CubCrafters to learn about the new Aerocet floats that are a popular option on the Carbon Cub.

Back-country flying in general and float flying specifically is really all about low-altitude ops. To slip into lakes and rivers, there's really no point in flying much higher than safe clearance above the treeline and for me, a wingspan or so will do it, especially when the terrain is falling away, as it usually is when you're ducking into a lake or a suitable pond. City folk tend to get nervous, if not a little incensed, when airplanes skim the trees. Remote lake dwellers, on the other hand, might not even lift their heads and people in boats wave their hands rather than shaking their fists.

At some point during my splash and goes, Randy Lervold mentioned that what we were doing—just fooling around on the water and examining the forest from close up—is what Cubs do. And it is, but for reasons that aren't always obvious and that I sometimes think are just an accident of history. Clearly, the Cub's planform—a slow-flying strutted high wing—is perfect for strapping floats to. But it's not the only such design. You'll see plenty of 180s, 185s and 206s on floats, plus the occasional Maule and Husky. Then there are the boats, the rare Grumman Widgeons, Lakes and the impossibly pokey Republic Seabee. What's interesting is that among all these designs, and that's not the entire list, Cub-type airplanes are the only ones still in production that outsell everything else, meaning that there are necessarily more new ones going on floats than anything else.

Between kits, the LSA Carbon Cub and the certified Top Cub, CubCrafters is selling just shy of 100 airplanes a year. Jim Richmond, owner of the company, says floats are popular option—maybe one airplane in five will get them.

Why is that? It's not because they're working airplanes, although the Top Cubs CC sells do earn their keep, since they're certified. The Carbon Cub is by far CC's biggest seller and because it's an LSA, it can't be a working airplane. Demand for floats is because the recreational and back-country-for-fun market just gravitates toward Cubs, whether vintage J-3s, Super Cubs or CC's new production. Cubs do make good floatplanes, but if there's more to it than that my guess is that when Piper followed the J-3 with the Super Cub, it hit the right combination of affordability, payload, reliable operation and economy that hasn't been matched since. And CubCrafters airplanes—all of them—are rich with Super Cub DNA. It's academic to speculate if Piper had stayed in the rag-and-tube game and selling what CC is, those airplanes would outsell everything else Piper makes by a wide margin, albeit for less profit than a Mirage or Meridian generates. But to sell airplanes, you gotta want to sell them. You have to embrace, philosophically speaking, the very idea of what your airplanes do.

When Jim Richmond was getting CubCrafters off the ground during the 1980s, Piper was still making the Super Cub, but not with much enthusiasm. Demand for the Super Cub's talents, then and now, wasn't overwhelming, but it was steady enough for CubCrafters to develop a brisk Super Cub restoration and overhaul business that eventually led to an entirely new certified aircraft in the early 2000s, the Top Cub. That airplane is essentially a thoroughly modernized and up-scaled Super Cub and the LSA Carbon Cub a more modern iteration yet. The Carbon Cub is to the original Super Cub as a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle is to the 2015 model; same idea, wholly different execution.

Yet it's still a Cub, characterized by predictable handling traits, a slow stall speed, low wing loading and good useful load. Let me clarify that last. As LSAs go, the Carbon Cub is on the heavy side at an empty weight of nearly 900 pounds. But with a 180-hp ASTM Titan engine, which accounts for that higher empty weight, the Carbon Cub's power loading is more than a third lower than the Super Cub ever was. The experimental version of the Carbon Cub is spec'd to 1865 pounds gross and still has lower power loading than the Super Cub with a useful load of about of about 650 pounds for the float version I flew. The EAB and the LSA versions are nearly identical so read between the lines however you like about legal weights.

With so much of its sales dependent on the LSA Carbon Cub, Richmond told me he's worried that elimination of the Third Class medical will decimate the LSA market. I hear this a lot and while I think what it will really do is cause the long-awaited and predicted shakeout, I'm not so sure buyers attracted to the Carbon Cub will dry up. There might be fewer of them, but on the other hand, irrespective of medicals, there's wealth out there and a cadre of buyers who can and will write a check for $230,000 for a new airplane. It's not a mass market, nor was it ever. Of course, journalists can sit confidently at their keyboards and say such things, without having to either sell airplanes or make a payroll.

Buyers of new airplanes want new for specific reasons that don't always relate to the practicality of how they'll be used or the hard numbers in a spreadsheet comparing new with used. There's something about being handed the keys to an airplane with fewer than 10 hours on it. A 30-year-old restoration, no matter how pristine, isn't quite the same.

Then there's the Cub thing Lervold and I were talking about. Maules go on floats and so do 185s and while both float and fly, the mystique is missing and for some, that matters. Maybe it's like Harley Davidsons, which aren't the best motorcycles in the absolute, but to some people they're just that.

Jim Richmond told me there may be sales potential in the emerging markets of China and India, which there probably is. But I wonder if a Chinese buyer, whose frame of reference is modern automobiles, will get the Cub ethos in the way U.S. buyers, having been steeped in the lore from birth, do. Will glassy water landings on the Yangtze or the Ganges for no other reason than just doing them become a thing?

I'm the wrong guy to answer that. I can barely explain why it's a thing for me, but I can assure you that it is.