The pilot puts on a Bell helmet, climbs into a cockpit narrower than a kitchen drawer, and starts two engines whose combined output would not run a small lawnmower at full noise. The whole aircraft, fully fuelled and with him in it, weighs 174 kilograms. The wingspan is just under five metres. And when the throttles open, the Colomban Cri-Cri does the kind of thing nobody expects: it loops, it rolls, it climbs at 1,200 feet a minute, and it lands at 35 knots on a piece of grass shorter than a tennis court.

It is the world’s smallest twin-engine aircraft. It is the world’s smallest aerobatic aircraft. It is also — extraordinarily — fully certified, fully aerobatic, and routinely flown at French and Swiss airshows by pilots who built theirs in a garage.

A homebuilt that broke the rules

Michel Colomban was a French aerospace engineer working at SNECMA in the 1960s when he became annoyed with what he saw as the unnecessary size and weight of the typical homebuilt aeroplane. The conventional homebuilt of the era — a Stinson, a Druine Turbulent, a Jodel D9 — was a single-seat aircraft of about 250 kg empty weight, built around a Volkswagen engine of about 60 horsepower. Colomban believed the same flight envelope could be reached with less than half that weight, less than half that power, and far better fuel economy.

His solution was the Cri-Cri — French for “Cricket” — designed around a pair of small two-stroke engines originally built for chainsaws and snowmobiles. Each engine produced just 15 horsepower. Combined, the Cri-Cri’s powerplant was less than half the output of a single Rotax 503. But because the airframe was built around aircraft-grade aluminium honeycomb sheets — the same material then being introduced on the Airbus A300 — the empty weight came in at 78 kilograms. The result was an aircraft with a power-to-weight ratio competitive with light helicopters.

The acrobatic credentials

Colomban himself was a glider aerobatic pilot. The Cri-Cri was certified for aerobatic flight from the start — loops, rolls, inverted flight, even snap rolls. Its low wing loading and high power-to-weight made it surprisingly capable in display flight. The retired French Air Force display pilot Jean Galaup flew Cri-Cri aerobatics at airshows across France and Switzerland through the 1990s and 2000s.

The electric, the jet, and the airshow circuit

The Cri-Cri has spawned three improbable variants. Hugues Duval — French test pilot and former Patrouille de France solo display — fitted a Cri-Cri with two Microturbo TRS-18 turbojets in 2003. The result, designated the MC-15 Cri-Cri Jet, broke its own world record for the smallest twin-jet aircraft and clocked 305 km/h in level flight.

In 2010, EADS Innovation Works built an electric Cri-Cri using four brushless DC motors and lithium-polymer battery packs. It achieved a 15-minute aerobatic flight on a single charge, reaching speeds of 262 km/h — a world record for an electric aircraft of any size. The same aircraft is now on display at the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace at Le Bourget.

And in 2014, Colomban himself supervised a hybrid-electric Cri-Cri variant that combined one piston engine with one electric motor, demonstrating the kind of architecture now appearing on much larger eVTOL air taxis from Joby and Eve.

The garage-built world record holder

Roughly 100 to 120 Cri-Cris are believed to be flying today across France, Switzerland, Belgium, the UK and the United States. Most were built by their owners over three or four years in suburban garages, working from Michel Colomban’s original plans — plans that, in 2026, still sell for €350 from the designer’s website and remain one of the most popular kit-built designs in European aviation.

A Cri-Cri is small. A Cri-Cri is loud — the chainsaw engines have that effect. A Cri-Cri is utterly unlike anything else you will ever sit inside that calls itself an aeroplane. But it loops, it rolls, it sets world records, and it does it on lawnmower fuel. That is, quietly, one of the best French achievements in aviation of the 20th century.

Sources: Aviation et Pilote, Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace, EADS Innovation Works.