Remos Gxis

A Fun - to - Fly Airplane for Any Pilot, Which Just Might Jump - Start The Flight - Training Insustry

- Rob Mark

With two hours of fuel remaining in the 22-gallon tank, my first inclination was to simply turn around and blow another hour or so in the pattern perfecting my landings with this perky little airplane. The Remos, along with my instructor, demo pilot Patrick Holland-Moritz, were both willing, but Pase walk sits about 45 miles south of the Baltic Sea, and the rules for VFR at night differ considerably from those in the United States. Night flying in Germany is only possible from certain airports, and Pasewalk, a small flying club field with a single 3,000-foot runway, isn’t one of them. Here pilots must possess a night approval on their pilot certificate and file a flight plan to be legal. I was merely a guest of the folks at the Remos factory, so a full stop was the best option, even if it wasn’t the most satisfying.

Holland-Moritz and I managed another hour and a half of fun flying with the GXiS, the company’s new fuel-injected special light-sport airplane (SLSA), the next morning and afternoon with the mercury hovering around freezing. Just these few flights were enough to make me want to take a GXiS back to the States; the airplane is that much fun to fly. The time I spent with the Remos crew and their new airplane made me realize that flying just for fun is highly underrated on our side of the Atlantic.

These days, we Americans have come to think of general aviation airplanes mostly as business tools. But if you’ve ever found yourself sitting in the backyard watching airplanes pass by overhead, remembering when you learned to fly and realizing you’ve forgotten long ago exactly what drew you to aviation, an airplane like the Remos might just be for you.