I spent most of the week in Parry Sound at Expedition Aircraft (previously known as Found Aircraft) doing stall, take-off and landing performance flight testing on the Expedition 350. Found Aircraft was founded by the Found brothers shortly after WWII, and they produced the Found FBA-2C single engine bush aircraft in the early 1960s. The aircraft was very well designed for that role, but they lost control of the company, and the new owner blew all the money on an ill-conceived successor model, and company folded. Bud Found managed to resurrect the company in the 1990s, and relaunched production of the updated Found FBA-2C1 and -2C2.

The company eventually realized that the bush aircraft market was fairly small, and that the tail wheel configuration would not sell well in the private owner market, so they decided to update the design with a tricycle landing gear, and changed the marketing name to Expedition Aircraft. They have a few rough edges to sort out in the cockpit, but I was quite impressed with the performance and handling, and the great utility of the aircraft.

The aircraft has four doors that fold fully open. The floor is completely flat, and there is no raised door sill, which greatly facilitates loading cargo. The aft doors have a cutout to allow them to be opened with the flaps fully down (unlike another popular high wing utility aircraft), which greatly increases safety in float plane operations, by aiding egress following a take-off or landing accident. There are no wing struts to get in the way, another useful feature for float plane operations. The structure in the cockpit area is steel tube, which has a great record for occupant protection in a crash.

I've knocked a few small things off the To Do List, and added a few more - net change one item shorter. I've been working on the interface between the cowling and the plenum chamber, with slow progress but a lot of time wasted going down dead end roads. Yesterday I discovered that the dimensions I was using for the last phase of the interface wouldn't work, so I had to scrap several hours of work. That discovery bummed me out completely, so I downed tools and opened a bottle of wine. Today I redid about half the wasted work.