Blue sky beckons

Ukrainian aircraft company Aeroprakt has built a business on a foundation made of dreams and aspirations. Run and managed by founders Oleg Lytovchenko and Yuri Yakovle, the pair once worked together as engineering designers at the famous Ukrainian aerospace company, Antonov. They formed a flying club, which, by 1991, became their fledgling company and which, across the intervening years has built more than 450 ultralight aeroplanes. Solutions reports.

Surrounded by almost impenetrable traffic, Aeroprakt makes its aeroplanes in an unlikely, two storey building in central Kiev, the grey walls of which are patched with colourful posters of all shapes and sizes of aircraft.

The company owns an airfield about an hour outside of Kiev where it keeps a small squadron of its own aeroplanes for the benefit of the company's owners and employees. Evidently, there's a passion that runs deep at Aeroprakt. Sheetmetal workers, machine operators, polishers, composites technicians – whatever its 60 employees do to earn a living, it's a safe bet that building aeroplanes is at the foundation.

But, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, if passion provides the driving force, then reason and good management should hold the reins. Alex Zhurba is Aeroprakt's factory manager and is endowed with a level headed pragmatism, especially when it comes to how aeroplanes are built. He's passionate about what he does, but it's clear that Mr Zhurba adopts a somewhat more practical and businesslike approach.

“A company's primary purpose,” he says, “is to make money, right? There are lots of people here who are obsessed with flying but our objective is to build the best aeroplane in the most efficient way possible. My own preoccupation is with productivity.”

Making progress

Mr Zhurba began the latest phase of his productivity push four years ago when he bought a Haas VF-4 vertical machining centre – a machine that introduced Aeroprakt's designers to the concept of CNC.

“They had to adjust their way of thinking; of conceiving and designing a part or component,” he recollects. “Eventually, the entire aeroplane was reconceived to make the most of the company's new CNC capability.”

Learning to use a new tool is the very essence of progress, so once Mr Zhurba had shown his designers the way ahead they were ready for the next step. “The VF-4 was followed a year or two later by a Haas GR-5 CNC router. This is an obvious machine for an aircraft builder. We use it to mill moulds for the fibreglass fuselage panels and long structural parts such as wing components. We cut the moulds from model board and use them to create the master moulds, which are made from composite, laid by hand.”

Mr Zhurba also bought a Haas Super Mini Mill that works non-stop on the hundreds of small parts that hold the larger parts of an airplane together. “We need a TL-25 toolroom lathe as well,” he says. “I have one with a sub-spindle on order for later this year.”

Up and away

Despite the global economic downturn, Alex Zhurba claims that sales of Aeroprakt aeroplanes are robust. The company currently builds around 60 units a year – some as kits, some as ready built – shipping them to distributors in dozens of countries. “In early 2009 we launched our latest model,” he says, “the A22 – LS ‘Light Sport', aimed primarily at the US market.”

The introduction of the Light Sport license category is expected to increase considerably the number of people who take up flying as a hobby. Sport pilots need fewer hours to achieve certification and, since the aircraft are smaller, lighter and cheaper to run than standard single engine planes, the cost of learning can be less than half that of the established, private pilot's route.

“Since we started using Haas CNC machine tools,” says Mr Zhurba, “we have reduced our labour input by more than 40%. If we keep improving our productivity I believe we can build up to 100 aeroplanes a year at this factory. I can't imagine us wanting to build more than that; the global market for ultralight aircraft just isn't big enough. Not at the moment, anyway.”

Time will tell. The efforts of companies like Aeroprakt – and in particular, to Mr Zhurba and his objective to keep overheads low, flying is more accessible and less expensive than it has ever been before. As most aspiring pilots will testify, learning to fly can be life changing. It is said that few things come close to the exhilaration of finding oneself aloft, alone and utterly self-reliant high above the distractions of everyday life.

Haas
www.haas.co.uk