Urban Air is an aircraft

Aircraft

An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...

 manufacturer based in the Czech Republic

Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....

.

The company is a manufacturer of light sport

Light-sport Aircraft

A Light-sport aircraft, also known as light sport aircraft or LSA, is a small aircraft that is simple to fly and which meets certain regulations set by a National aviation authority restricting weight and performance...

 and ultralight aircraft and employs 40 people. The company was founded in 1998 by five partners. Their first prototype

Prototype

A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον , "primitive form", neutral of πρωτότυπος , "original, primitive", from πρῶτος , "first" and τύπος ,...

 made its inaugural flight in May 1996, thus pre-dating the company by two years. It had been in the design

Design

Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...

 and production stages since 1992, when Pavel Urban, Karel Faltus, and Ing. Miloš Mládek started design. They were also assisted by Schempp-Hirth

Schempp-Hirth

Schempp-Hirth Flugzeugbau GmbH is a glider manufacturer based in Kirchheim unter Teck, Germany.-History:Martin Schempp founded his own company in Göppingen in 1935, with the assistance of Wolf Hirth. The company was initially called "Sportflugzeugbau Göppingen Martin Schempp"...

.

Aircraft

Urban Air has designed and built two aircraft types, the Lambada and the Samba. Both can be equipped with a tow hook to tow gliders

Glider aircraft

Glider aircraft are heavier-than-air craft that are supported in flight by the dynamic reaction of the air against their lifting surfaces, and whose free flight does not depend on an engine. Mostly these types of aircraft are intended for routine operation without engines, though engine failure can...

 aloft. In addition, parachute

Parachute

A parachute is a device used to slow the motion of an object through an atmosphere by creating drag, or in the case of ram-air parachutes, aerodynamic lift. Parachutes are usually made out of light, strong cloth, originally silk, now most commonly nylon...

 recovery systems are an option. The aircraft are made of fiberglass

Fiberglass

Glass fiber is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass.Glassmakers throughout history have experimented with glass fibers, but mass manufacture of glass fiber was only made possible with the invention of finer machine tooling...

 and carbon fiber

Carbon fiber

Carbon fiber, alternatively graphite fiber, carbon graphite or CF, is a material consisting of fibers about 5–10 μm in diameter and composed mostly of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms are bonded together in crystals that are more or less aligned parallel to the long axis of the fiber...

 composite materials. They are designed so as to quickly taken apart, put in a trailer

Trailer (vehicle)

A trailer is generally an unpowered vehicle pulled by a powered vehicle. Commonly, the term trailer refers to such vehicles used for transport of goods and materials....

, and hauled where they are needed/wanted.

Lambada

The Lambada, officially called the UFM 13 Lambada, was the company's first airplane. It had been in design stages since 1992, and the prototype's first flight was on 23 May 1996. The design was based on that of gliders so as to enhance performance. The aircraft comes with wing extenders that increase the wingspan to 15 meters. It also has flaps and spoilers

Spoiler (aeronautics)

In aeronautics, a spoiler is a device intended to reduce lift in an aircraft. Spoilers are plates on the top surface of a wing which can be extended upward into the airflow and spoil it. By doing so, the spoiler creates a carefully controlled stall over the portion of the wing behind it, greatly...

. It is a single-engine, taildragger

Conventional landing gear

thumb|The [[Piper PA-18|Piper Super Cub]] is a popular taildragger aircraft.thumb|right|A [[Cessna 150]] converted to taildragger configuration by installation of an after-market modification kit....

 monoplane

Monoplane

A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with one main set of wing surfaces, in contrast to a biplane or triplane. Since the late 1930s it has been the most common form for a fixed wing aircraft.-Types of monoplane:...

.

Samba

Urban Air Samba

-External links:*...

The Samba was the company's second aircraft. It took off on its first test

Experiment

An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...

 flight in June 1999. It is made primarily of carbon laminate. The Samba is, like the Lambada, a single-engine monoplane, but has tricycle gear

Tricycle gear

Tricycle gear describes an aircraft undercarriage, or landing gear, arranged in a tricycle fashion. The tricycle arrangement has one wheel in the front, called the nose wheel, and two or more main wheels slightly aft of the center of gravity...

instead of the traditional taildragger gear. An improved version, the Samba XXL has been in production since 2004.

External links

• Official Site of Urban Air