Extra, Extra!

This is my newest ride! What do you think? Sunrise needs another Extra instructor and I draw the lucky straw.

I started getting familiar with this baby today. The cockpit checkout was interesting; it’s far more sparse than other Extras I’ve flown. This aircraft is one of the older 300 models (no -L or -S suffix, just a plain old 300), and the main difference seems to be the mid-wing.

The visibility looks perfectly fine to me, especially after occupying the front seat of a Pitts S-2B, but I can see why they shifted the wing to the bottom of the fuselage in subsequent models. Not only does it improve the viz, but it’s a bit easier to get in and out of the aircraft as well. I’ve been told that the mid-wing is better from an aerobatics perspective, but at this level the opinions may be a bit subjective. On the other hand, the Edge 540 is a mid-wing design, so there’s probably something to it.

Anyway, if I can make the financial end work out, perhaps I’ll be flying this in intermediate next season. It would be nice to move into an airplane that I could take all the way to unlimited. An S-1 would be cheaper to operate, but I’d eventually be faced with another transition, something that’s time consuming and expensive.

The Pepsi and Sunrise logos on the airframe are sort of hokey, but they do impart that sense of flying in the big leagues. Those guys have logos on everything.

I should probably be a little nervous about flying this thing. There aren’t any cheap parts on it. One guy I know had to replace the canopy on his 300L and the glass alone was something like $18,000. It might have included the canopy skirt. Either way, that’s a lot of coin. On the other hand, at solo weight the Extra 300 can be stressed to +10/-8g. It’s hard to put a price on that.