Tango for Two.

Here's a kit you can build in 30days ... with some help

At Sun'n Fun 1983, Ken Fickett unveiled a new side-by-side, two-place, all-composite Porsche-powered airplane with a retractable trigear, known as the Aero Mirage TC-2. It first flew on May 6, 1983, and Fickett went on to produce a number of airframe kits for builders.

At Sun 'n Fun 1997, he and co-designer Carl Mike Schlick exhibited the prototype of a newer two-place composite airplane, called Tango, that initially flew in November 1996, although the design was still being finalized. The airplane had been developed over a two-year period, but the program has now evolved into kits being delivered to customers. To date, one airplane has flown, and at least eight others are under construction with two expected to fly by the time this appears in print.

The present organization is called Team Tango, and it has been involved in a joint venture with a large Chinese company, DFL Holdings, Inc., since 1996. "Our program was for our Chinese partners to receive technology relative to the use of composites for construction of aircraft that they could produce in that part of the world," Fickett said. We have delivered molds to China, and they have fabricated some parts, but as far as I know, no complete aircraft have been built there."

Unlike the Aero …