12 March 2025
Sssh! Say it quietly… There’s a new version of the Sling two-seater being used at Long Beach Airport, California with the Sling Pilot Academy. It’s called (sssh! again) the Whisper.
Long Beach Airport, like much of southern California’s waterside cities these days, is in a densely populated area. It’s just recently opened the latest branch of the Sling Pilot Academy, which now has five locations, and already has 50 students with capacity for ‘hundreds more’.
Sling says the Whisper is designed to be as quiet as possible. The Rotax 912iS engine, already a quiet engine, is fitted with a custom exhaust known as ‘The Swiss Muffler’ which extends under the fuselage and exits behind the wing, upwards, to limit noise on the ground.
The aircraft also has a quieter propeller and acoustic damping material in the engine bay. The result is that it’s around 10 decibels quieter than a standard Sling LSA – and also runs on unleaded mogas.
Sling’s Matt Liknaitzky said, “We spent literally 18 months on it and it cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this. We realized, even though we do already have the quietest airplanes, we have to do better —because we intend to stay flying in the city (and) we want to be the best neighbour we can.”
Sling Pilot Academy is really serious about being as quiet as possible, and beating local noise limits.
As well as making the Sling Whisper, the Academy said, “We enforce our procedures and have dismissed pilots and flight instructors from our organization for not complying with these procedures where possible.
“We have conducted noise tests to evaluate which procedures result in the lowest impact to the local community. Our most-recent testing concluding that reduced rpm when overflying noise-sensitive areas had the best results, hence our adoption of a procedure that has our pilots leveled off after a climb before overflying noise-sensitive areas.”
