Overview
Evolution Aircraft Company is the current name of the Oregon kit-aircraft manufacturer founded in 1981 as Lancair International by Lance Neibauer. For four decades the company has built fast, composite, owner-built airplanes from its Redmond, Oregon base, and it remains in production today with the piston and turbine versions of the Lancair Evolution. The Lancair name lives on across the catalogue in the high-performance singles the company shipped in kit form.
Heritage
Neibauer’s early Lancair 200, 235, 320, and 360 set the formula: a slick carbon-fiber airframe cruising faster than certified metal singles on the same power, sold as a kit to amateur builders. More than 600 kits had shipped by 1990. The four-seat Lancair IV and its pressurized Lancair IV-P followed, joined by the Walter-turbine Lancair PropJet IV. A separate certified line, the Columbia 300 and 400, was spun off and sold to Cessna in 2007. In 2008 the company flew the clean-sheet Lancair Evolution, a pressurized turboprop kit. In 2017 the legacy Lancair kit designs were sold to a separate firm, Lancair International, LLC, and the Redmond operation that kept the Evolution renamed itself Evolution Aircraft Company.
Design Signature
Speed from aerodynamics and composite construction, delivered in kit form. Every airframe is Experimental Amateur-Built, individually airworthiness-certificated, and finished to its builder’s standard. The line runs from simple two-seat singles to a pressurized 300-knot turboprop, but the constant is a slick, high-wing-loading airframe that rewards a current, disciplined pilot and asks for real transition training.
For Owners
An Evolution or a Lancair is a builder’s airplane first. There is no type certificate and no factory POH, so equipment, build quality, insurance, and resale all track the individual airframe and its builder. The turbine models carry turboprop operating economics; the pistons carry the upkeep of high-output, turbocharged Continental power. The reward is certified-class capability, pressurization and turbine speed among it, at a fraction of a factory airplane’s price, for owners willing to build and to train.