Notes & Observations

Why I Drove Fourteen Hours to Spirit Engineering

I was aware that the Spirit SE-1 had debuted at AirVenture 2025, but it wasn’t until one morning in April 2026 that the airplane truly caught my attention. That morning I stumbled across an AOPA video by my friend Dave Hirschman. “Wow, this looks interesting. I need to talk to Dave”, and so I gave him a call. After speaking with Dave I used the company’s website link to schedule a tour — this airplane and company now had my attention.

Unfortunately, airfares had just more than doubled and the airlines were cutting flights to secondary markets like Grand Junction. So what the heck, I hadn’t been on a proper road trip in quite a while so I decided to get in my car and just drive there, according to Google Maps a 14 hour errand, each way.

Consistent with the appointment I had made on the company’s website I showed up at 9:00 on that Tuesday and was greeted by Steve Wood himself. It turns out that Dave had let Steve know that I was visiting and that he’d probably like meeting me since I had spent time in the general aviation manufacturing space too.

I don’t like wasting time so I came prepared, I arrived with three pages of questions, none of which could be answered in a single sentence. Most of the questions were actually more like “why did you make this design choice instead of that?” and “what was your thought process on this design”, etc.

Having run a general aviation company I understood immediately everything I saw, both in terms of the part design, and the manufacturing processes. I was impressed, some serious thought and expertise had gone into this. For example, with all of the aluminum ribs and support structure parts, every flanged edge was scalloped between the rivet holes. This is something you’ll see other aluminum airplane builders do manually to parts when they are going all out for show awards and to eliminate every gram of weight possible. I spotted this kind of design and effort through almost every assembly.

I also appreciated further the simplicity and things the plane did not include, all of which made it lighter, with less labor to build, and therefore less expensive. This was the absolute embodiment of my less-is-more ethic!

Rather than following a formal tour as I expected, Steve and I spent the morning following wherever the conversation led us. One question naturally led to another until we’d covered virtually every aspect of the airplane and the business.

Some comparisons: at CubCrafters we used 13 assembly stations for each aircraft (not including subassembly stations), Spirit uses 5. A Carbon Cub circa 2018 had 43 separate vacuum bagged carbon fiber parts in it, the SE-1 has none. There is not a single painted part in the aircraft so there is no paint booth, mess, or need to refinish any mistakes in the coatings process. Starting to understand the simplicity here?

In all I didn’t see a single shortcut in either design or manufacturing, rather I saw further evidence of a clear vision and significant time invested in optimizing the design of every single part which in all cases included the fabrication and assembly.

Before I knew it, Steve and I had spent three hours on the floor, then another hour in their conference room discussing the industry, getting a product like this to market, and more about Steve’s thinking on the whole business.

Though I had my camera and intended to take lots of pictures I could study later, I had become so engrossed in our conversation that I left with only one picture, of me sitting in a plane at the end of the assembly line.

I then had another 14 hours to process what I had just experienced on the drive home. The visit cemented everything I had carefully spotted in the videos of the factory, and every question I had about why something was designed or manufactured the way it was.  

In all, my confidence in the aircraft and the company was further boosted and I now felt very comfortable ordering an aircraft. Time well spent, I now just can’t wait to fly this airplane!