Aircraft design for Spyker
It began with a single e-mail, …if I would be able to help with some illustrations for a yet-to-be-announced project, coming from a yet-to-be-introduced person. Boy did I know it would end up with an awsome project.
Allthough it is never realised and chances are slim to none that it will happen… designing an aircraft for a world-famous dutch sportscar-brand is still a bit living the dream right!?
The idea came from Hans Teijgeler, who builds small two- or four-seater aircrafts on request, through his company ‘Lufthans Aircraft’. Together with his friend Jeffrey Jansen (Who represents the Spyker-part, owning one and knowing a few much needed contacts at Spyker-Headquarters) they came up with the idea to propose an aircraft-design to dutch sportscar manufacturer Spyker, to help promote their upcoming SUV model ‘D12 - Peking to Paris’. The results are shown in the illustrations.
Hans described the project as follows:
Back in 2009, good friend and Spyker adept Jeffrey and I sat down and figured the following: Dutch Spyker cars, manufacturers of very high-end bespoke sports cars, use their (frankly rather limited) aviation history (in WW-I Spyker produced a small number of aircraft) to market their cars. Propeller in logo, propeller theme everywhere, dashboard designed after an aircraft instrument panel, aviation quality wiring, etc etc. And yet they didn’t own an aircraft themselves!!
Their nearly century-old aircraft designs were named V-1, V-2 and V-3 (V for Vliegtuig - aircraft in Dutch). How better to support the awaited launch of their 4-seater super-SUV model than with a 4-seater aircraft that would be heavily inspired by the SUV, and dubbed V-4.
So the PH-VIV callsign was reserved at the Dutch aviation authorities, a design that had been forming in my head for quite some time was modified to inject a whole lot of Spyker-DNA into it. I contacted Tim Traas, a very talented graphic designer and car enthusiast, and with the three of us we sat down to create this.
We managed to reserve a 15-minute slot in the agenda of Spyker CEO Victor Müller and ended up talking for an hour and a half with him.
Unknown to us (and the rest of the world), he was already knee-deep into purchasing Saab at that time, and didn’t have any finances for their own plane. Müller ended up leaving Spykers day-to-day business, and the Super SUV never found its way to the public either.
And so this idea died a graceful dead.
All-aluminium design, inspired by the Vans RV-7, but lenghtened and strengthened. Wings off the F1 Rocket Evo (I found the company in the Czech republic who manufactured the wing for them and got a quote for a ready-built wing, complete with fowler flaps and laminar flow profile). Power by a turbocharged Subaru, interior heavily leaning on the Spyker design, as are the roofline and the air intakes. Wings are detatchable to make shipment to car shows across the globe possible.
