Dear Sam
Buying any amateur built aircraft from a country with regulations that are on a much lower level than the UK is a lottery, if you are lucky it may be OK but many are below an acceptable UK standard – it just depends how careful the builders were and whether they stuck to the manual or did their own thing and included mods.
In this case the type of aircraft is a Kitfox Vixen, not a Mk 5, and the Vixen is not a type we have yet cleared in the UK. We do have one Kitfox Vixen going through the process (has been for about a year) but that is powered by a Rotax engine not the much heavier Lycoming.
Personally I would not dream of flying an amateur built US built kitplane trans Atlantic unless I had been through every inch of it first, and established its safety through a great deal of proving flying over land, remember this is an Experimental category aeroplane in the USA and it will never have had any kind of inspection like we are accustomed to in the UK, and its reliability levels may be much lower than in a certified aircraft like you’ve ferried over before. For example early Kitfoxes had a lot of problems with fuel feed and fuel starvation, the header tank arrangement and routing of the fuel lines is critical – you’d not want to in mid-Atlantic that the fuel was feeding only from one tank and the other was not useable.
All this makes your plan not impossible but a high risk enterprise booth in terms of personal safety in the crossing and the risk of the aircraft being found to be substandard and not eligible for a UK permit to fly on arrival, or needing a major rework programme or modifications to make it acceptable. While perhaps more reliable than a Rotax, the heavier Lycoming engine means the aircraft would have to be able to cleared to a higher max gross weight if it is to have a worthwhile payload, and after changes of ownership and long elapsed time since it was first designed, I am not sure whether the manufacturers will have the data needed to satisfy LAA that the airframe can be cleared structurally at the higher weight, or that they will have the strength calculations for the Lycoming engine mount on file still. The effect on flight handling of the much heavier engine, giving amore forward cg would also need to be evaluated. The Rotax powered Vixen had problems with the flight test (pitch instability with full flap) and this has already meant that one needing a mod doing to restrict the flap travel to first stage only, at the expense of the STOL landing performance.
For more advice see this technical leaflet
http://www.lightaircraftassociation....20Aircraft.pdf
Sorry to be not very encouraging,
Kind regards
Francis Donaldson
Chief Engineer
www.laa.uk.com • +44 (0)1280 846786