Flying at dusk, against the law

In 1980s Yugoslavia private flying of any kind was effectively illegal, so Ivo Boscarol and his friends flew their home-built powered hang gliders in secret, between dusk and dark. The timing and the triangular wings earned them a nickname, the bats, and when Boscarol turned the hobby into a business he named it after the Italian for bat, pipistrello. Born in 1956 and trained as an economist at the University of Ljubljana, he had grown up in Ajdovščina near a small military airfield. The first series-built trike, the Basic, appeared in 1989, the year Pipistrel counts as its beginning, and 32 were sold.

From trikes to composite motor gliders

Slovenian Wikipedia calls Pipistrel the first and only private aircraft manufacturer in Yugoslavia. It was registered as Pipistrel d.o.o. on 18 November 1992, and over its first ten years almost 600 trikes went to more than 30 countries. As composites spread in the mid-1990s, the company switched to proper aeroplanes: the Sinus motor glider, first flown on 16 October 1996, was the first series-built ultralight made of composite materials, and the Virus followed on 10 August 1999. In 2004 a Sinus flown by Matevž Lenarčič became the first ultralight to fly around the world, and the Taurus became the first side-by-side two-seat self-launching glider.

Winning NASA’s challenges

Pipistrel made its name in America by beating everyone at efficiency. A modified Virus won most categories of NASA’s 2007 Centennial Challenge for personal air vehicles, a Pipistrel team won again in 2008, and in 2011 the four-seat electric Taurus G4 won the CAFE/NASA Green Flight Challenge. In December 2007 the Taurus Electro had flown as the world’s first two-seat fully electric aircraft. In 2015 India’s defence ministry chose Pipistrel to supply 194 Virus SW 80 trainers. There were bumps: in 2012 the FAA briefly banned some imports because inspectors could not find the company’s Italian factory on Google Earth.

First to certify an electric aeroplane

The electric work paid off on 10 June 2020, when EASA granted the Velis Electro, an electric development of the Virus SW 121, the world’s first type certificate for an electric aircraft. The first was delivered to a Swiss customer on 16 July 2020. It was designed above all for training, with repeated take-offs and landings at the airfield. Pipistrel also helped fly the HY4 hydrogen fuel-cell four-seater in 2016, tested a 200 kW hybrid powertrain in a Panthera mock-up, and set up Pipistrel Vertical Solutions in 2019 for an electric VTOL design.

Bought by Textron

By March 2019 Pipistrel had produced more than 2,000 aircraft, including the 1,000th of the Sinus and Virus family, and in June 2020 it employed 250 people. In March 2022 Textron, owner of Cessna and Beechcraft, agreed to buy the company to form a new electric aviation division, Textron eAviation; the deal closed in April 2022, at a price English Wikipedia gives as $235 million and Slovenian Wikipedia as $218 million. Boscarol stayed on as a minority shareholder and chairman emeritus, and Pipistrel kept its headquarters in Ajdovščina and its plant near Gorizia in Italy.

Заводы

• Ajdovščina works · Ajdovščina, Slovenia — Purpose-built facility next to the airfield from 2003
• Gorizia works · near Gorizia, Italy — Opened partly to benefit from Italy’s agreements with the US

Люди

• Ivo Boscarol · founder (born 1956) — Golden Order for Merits of Slovenia, 2011; chairman emeritus after the Textron sale
• Vida Lorbek · first manager of Pipistrel d.o.o., 1992
• Matevž Lenarčič · pilot — Flew a Sinus around the world, 2004

Рекорды и первые достижения

• First ultralight aircraft to fly around the world, Sinus, 2004
• World’s first two-seat fully electric aircraft, Taurus Electro, December 2007
• World’s first type certificate for an electric aircraft, Velis Electro, 10 June 2020
• Aarohi Pandit, first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the Pacific in a light-sport aircraft, Sinus, 2019