WELCOME

Wind in the Wires

Welcome to the wonderful world of “Wind in the Wires”, blog site of Classic Era Aviation, Australian Agency for Czech manufactured Verner Radial Aircraft Engines. As the newly appointed agent for these innovative engines, it gives me the pleasure to introduce myself to this appointment.

From a very young age I was enthralled by aviation and it was destined to eventually lead to a professional career in same. As I grew up, such novels as “Biggles” & Fate is the Hunter” were well read members of my childhood library. The passion was rapidly developing!

Along the way I had become passionate about biplanes and the era of “Art Deco” and in Aviation circles the “Classic Era” of Aviation. Names like Rosco Turner, Ernie Ghan and the like were centre stage and idols to whom any inspiring young aviator may aspire.

Turn the clock forward to start of this century, after much research through the 1990’s, the opportunity arose to build my first aircraft, I decided to build Vans RV-8 and threw my heart and sole into the project and with an excellent result, the bug had bit me. This aircraft remained in my possession for over 20 years and having flown over 1000 hours in “The Boy”, it was time to pass it onto another owner.

Another two aircraft had come up on my radar screen, The “Flitzer” series designed by Lynn Williams and the John Hatz designed “Hatz CB-1” which was later enhanced into the model “Hatz Classic”. The “Flitzer” series are a delightful range and only for the fact of there only being single seat versions, I may well have taken on a “Flitzer” project.

Earlier this decade I sold my RV. Once again lurked the adage of once again building and flying a biplane, the “Hatz Classic” was back in front and centre stage. Well no time like the present I set about re-acquainting with the Hatz Association in USA and getting myself up to speed of building and flying these wonderful biplanes. There were quite a large number flying and including just one a “Hatz CB-1” flying in Australia.

There were a few completed and flying with radial engines and I took particular note of a couple successfully operating a with a newly designed Verner 9 cylinder radial from the Czech Republic, the VERNER 9S. The more I investigated, the more ensconced I became and envisaged this power plant as my engine of choice.

The Verner Company was launched in 1993 by Pravoslav Verner (Snr), manufacturing purpose built, horizontally opposed, aircraft engines. In later years his son Kamil joined the team and in 2011 they commenced production of radial aero engines. Initially producing a 3 cylinder and later 5 cylinder versions, specifically targeting the power parachute and rogallo wing markets, later installed on parasol wing designs. In 2017, both the 7U and 9S models commenced production and as the say, the rest is history. These days Kamil now leads the company from strength to strength and they are currently developing an 11 cylinder version. WOW!

See:- www.vernermotor.com.