THE T600N

This is the T600N being flown by ex RAF fighter pilot Mike Holmes

At present we operate four of these and are awaiting our fifth which should be arriving in August. Powered by 80hp four-stroke Jabiru engines they cruise quietly along at around 80mph ..... just a little slower than what Mike was used to but he’s having a whale of a time none the less.

The T600N (‘T’ at the beginning standing for ‘Thruster’ and ‘N’ at the end standing for ‘Nosewheel’ …. the T600’T’ is a tailwheel version) has evolved into its present incarnation through an exciting history of development that goes back to its birthplace in the early 1980s in eastern Australia where it was first made as a single seater. It was originally designed and built by a Boeing 747 Captain and a young friend of his and then the ‘Gemini’ as it was christened proved its worth by being flown all up the wild and unpopulated eastern Australian coast. An exciting tale worthy of an hour-long film under the popular TV series entitled ‘A Wing And A Prayer’.

It was then developed and manufactured commercially as a two-seater by a Microlight manufacturing company in Australia who thought the name of the aircraft could be made a lttle more macho so they renamed it The ‘TST’ short for ‘Thruster’ (also the name of their Company – Thruster Aircraft Ltd - who else but Australia could come up with the name Thruster!) and in 1987 it was brought into the UK by a British company who put it through the UK CAA airworthiness mill and began manufacturing it under licence.

In 1987 we purchased the first Thruster TST aircraft to roll off the ‘production line’ (if you can call it that because microlight manufacturing was, and still is to a large extent, very much a cottage industry). For three years prior to that we’d been teaching on Flexwing aircraft due to the demise (another rivetting tale, but too long to go into here) of the fixed-wing microlight industry in 1984.

Up until then, on Flexwings, we could only teach when conditions were calm enough - which was usually in the evenings. Daytime was usually too windy or too thermally. But from the very first day we took delivery of the TST, as it was known then, our training hours quadrupled because we could handle almost anything (within reason) that mother nature threw at us and from then on our Flexwing training began to dwindle as more and more of our students came to realise that the fixed-wing guys were progressing so much more quickly. Eventually in 1990, because so many of our students had jumped horses so to speak, we regretfully sold our last Flexwing training machine and became a Fixed-wing-only training school.

It very soon became apparent that the TST was the best thing since sliced bread and Popham airfield by 1999 had no less than about 40 – yes forty – Thrusters all lined up and tied down in the parking areas. It was an incredible sight. One day I climbed up the water tower to take a photo of them all, but unfortunately the picture has got lost. A terrible shame really because it really was a sight to behold. The MD of Thruster Aircraft in Australia visited Popham one day and he was absolutely gobsmacked; never ever seen so many in one place.

To cut a long story short, the UK company in Cornwall eventually went into liquidation but the manufacturing rights were bought by Gordon & Jill Pill (Gordon was the proud owner of a Thruster TST) who formed a new company Thruster Air Services Ltd at Ginge Nr Wantage Berkshire. Many’s the tale to be told about the intervening years but to cut a long story short, eventually the Thruster design was completely bought out and many improvements made. A big hiccup came about in the microlight world around 1997 due to all microlights in the UK being found by the CAA to be overweight due to a misunderstanding of the regulations by most manufacturers and this caused havoc to all the fixed-wing manufacturers including Gordon and Jill’s outfit when just about every 2-seater fixed-wing aircraft was deemed to be only useable legally as a SINGLE seater! Naturally, this also had an immense impact on schools who only had overweight aircraft as their main training aircraft. We were fortunate though to have made a decision in 1993 to change to the AX3 so that by 1997 all our training aircraft were AX3s which just about scraped through the weight limit with half a gram to spare so long as we removed various bits and pieces that had been added since purchase (including accumulated mud from underneath the cockpit!).

I ought to explain the reason for jumping horses here. The old TST was a taildragger. The AX3 is a nosewheel aircraft. We won’t go into the whys and wherefores here as to the various advantages and disadvantages of the two types, but suffice to say that the TST, being a taildragger, although slightly more at home on really rough terrain, was quite difficult to get to grips with in the landing phase (a difficult task to master in any event). Nosewheel aircraft are considerably easier to land and that’s the reason why we decided to change our training fleet, simply to make it easier for our students.

The weight issue caused Gordon to virtually completely re-design the whole aeroplane and the result truly is a case of the Phoenix having risen out of the ashes. What an amazing piece of machinery it is. Gordon has totally transformed it into a truly superb aeroplane without sacrificing any of the fun element which is so much the ethos of microlight flying and which we are in danger of losing as technology produces even sleeker and faster aeroplanes – in Europe they now have two-seater microlights (ultralights as they call them over there) capable of speeds approaching 200mph but in my book that’s not what microlight flying is all about. With such aeroplanes you are all sealed up inside a cockpit with no option on a sweltering summer’s day to remove the doors and experience the luxury of a cool breeze blowing through your hair as you soar the thermals at 2000ft in your shirtsleeves. This you CAN do in the T600 and it’s wonderful!

At 80 mph cruise (as fast as a Tiger Moth) and almost four hours duration, because aeroplanes fly in straight lines and without the hold-ups experienced on the roads, the T600 can cover great distances before needing to be re-fuelled. Vast areas can be explored in a very short time yet it can still safely dawdle along at less than 40mph if you want to do some aerial photography or spend some time observing a particular event or piece of the land – crop circles for instance.

Go from Popham to the Lake District, Lands End, Wales. You name it, you can go there, land at any airfield or private strip, hire a car and go off exploring the local haunts, or of course re-fuel and take in the beautiful scenery from the air. In the summer there’s plenty of time to do all this before taking off again and returning home before dark. Of course if you have a hankering to nip off to the top of Scotland or maybe down to Madrid in Spain, you’ll need just a little more time! But pilots are doing log-distance trips like this regularly now, just taking the precaution of wearing life-jackets in the relatively unlikely event that the engine quits over the short stretch of sea between Dover and the French coast.

..... I could go on for hours. There’s much more to tell. But you need to come and experience all this stuff for yourself so I’ll see you at the airfield one day hopefully when you too can experience the magic of the T600.

Just a final word though. It does sadden me that so many people are scared of flying and won’t do it because they think that it’s dangerous. The fact is that these same people think nothing of getting into their cars and suffer the high risk of becoming yet another statistic in the carnage we regularly see in road accidents. Flying these microlight aircraft is a million times more safe than driving on the roads - providing you’ve been taught properly. Perhaps the ‘million times’ is a SLIGHT exaggeration but the fact remains that microlight flying, statistically, IS THE safest form of flight and for me personally I’m just as much at home in the air as in my car ..... and it really IS a million times more fun!

AX3 :: Twiggy :: T600N