ADVENTURES OF THE AIRPLANE FACTORY, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

The newly-built Sling 4, a light 4 seater variation of the standard Sling, left on an adventure Around The World. 

This time Mike, James and Jean worked out a flight path circumnavigating the earth in an Easterly direction with James and Jean flying all the way to Los Angeles, and then Jean and Mike flying all the way back home.

This adventure proved to be quite different from the 2009 adventure, with red-tape causing a lot of frustration in many countries but concluded with Mike and Jean flying from Brazil non-stop to Cape Town in order to get home.

The Sling 5577 project was a new milestone in adventure for The Airplane Factory.

The 5577 project was about taking 5 x technically superior men and 5 x aesthetically pleasing women, build a Sling in 7 x days, and then fly it to Poland in 7 x days to deliver it to its eager new owner. A bit like Madiba's 46664, but with a considerably shorter period of hard labour.

For the adventure of it, and also to prove the aircraft to themselves and the world, during July and August 2009 Mike Blyth and James Pitman, the company's founders, flew the production prototype Sling around the world, via EAA Oshkosh, the world's largest airshow. The aircraft performed flawlessly, flying numerous legs over 2 000nm (3 600 km) over the world's oceans, east to west and with the almost the entire route in the ITCZ. The only differences between the round the world aircraft and the standard production Sling were additional fuel tanks in the wings and an additional 15 layers of glass-fibre in the undercarriage.