NY to Paris flight / Lancair-Columbia / Rocket Racing

Columbia Aircraft Manufacturing

Columbia (formerly known as Lancair Certified) is an amazing company that I have been fortunate to have a relationship with for the past five years.

In the year 2000, I was looking for an aircraft that I could fly from New York to Paris. I wanted to use this event to touch on our past aviation history, showcase the state of the art of the present technology and then look in to the future of flight with the XPRIZE. Joe Dobronski (former chief test pilot for McDonnell Douglas) suggested Lancair as being the best small piston aircraft available, so I called up Lance Neibauer and went to visit him at the factory in Bend, OR.

The team at Lancair bought into the concept and went to work building the program to support the trip. The rest, as they say is history, although after all was said and done, Gregg Maryniak who was my flight director, program manager, mentor (and occasionally confuses me by trying to explain orbital mechanics, and stuff like hypergolicity) remarked how it really was extraordinary in this day and age to work with a company who bulit us a custom plane and supported this risky flight project with only a handshake as an agreemnt.

Although Columbia Aircraft Manufacturing is growing into a much larger company now (with the associated occasional growing pains) they are the kind of company where a handshake means something. www.FlyColumbia.com

Oh, yeah...I work for Columbia in a PR capacity these days.

– Erik R. Lindbergh

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" The rain is beating hard against The New Spirit of St. Louis. Later that night as I pass through the mid-Atlantic storm system, the stars come out. I start to relax in the clear, calm air. Polaris, the North Star is holding steady off my left wing, the moon above my right. I was cradled in the same sky that had carried my grandfather across the ocean seventy-five years ago. "

— Erik R. Lindbergh