The Maverick
Light-Sport Aircraft
A roadable powered parachute By Bruce Moore
Forget any preconceived notions you may have about
powered parachutes. The Maverick is a fully roadable,
two-person "dune buggy" that flies! Other powered parachutes I have seen were cumbersome and needed large
clear spaces and smooth ground to launch and recover, and
the cart was a minimal structure only sufficient to hold the
engine and people. With the Maverick, you can travel any
paved road at highway speeds, negotiate a backcountry trail
like a Jeep, then in ten minutes rig your wing and jump over
jungle and rivers to the next clearing. All the restrictions and
inconveniences of a traditional powered parachute have
been carefully analyzed and eliminated.
"Ingenious" is the word I keep wanting to use while describing the Maverick and the engineering and problem
solving that went into its design. The mast and boom system
for the wing is ingenious. The use of electric servos controlled by the steering wheel for operating the wing brakes
is ingenious. The switchable drive shaft coupler that routes
the engine power to the rear axle or the five-blade composite propeller is ingenious. Maverick even has a line controller on the right side of the cockpit that gathers the slack out
of the parachute lines before takeoff to keep them clear of
the propeller until the weight of the car straightens the lines.
The Maverick is built by the Beyond Roads division of the
Indigenous People's Technology and Education Center
(I-TEC) at the Dunnellon Airport in Florida. While there I got
to tour the Maverick assembly facility and fly with the CEO
and design engineer, Troy Townsend. Troy wears many hats.
EAA Experimenter
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