The notion that a basic training aircraft should be light, cheap and small has been dented by the advent of the 400 kilobuck Cessna 172, which is none of those things. But one of the companies that hasn’t abandoned the minimalist trainer idea is Pipistrel, the innovative Slovenian aircraft maker that continues to plumb the bleeding edge of aero tech with new designs, one of which is the Alpha Trainer we’ll look at in this review. An electric version may appear this year.
Cheap trainers have been tried before. Four decades ago, Cessna plied that market with the 150 Commuter and 20 years after that, Piper tried with the Cadet. What’s new about Pipistrel’s Alpha is that it’s based on not just a light airframe, but an obsessively light airframe and one built with the lowest operating costs as line one in the design brief. In that sense, its competition may be not just LSA-type trainers, but the emerging diesel market, which, despite high purchase prices, claims low operating costs. At $83,181 at current exchange rates, the Alpha is one-fifth the cost of new Cessna 172.