By Robbie Culver

Matt Higgins and his wife, Laurie, owners of Hummel Aircraft, are focused on fun, affordable flying. Their line of ultralight and light-sport aircraft are all aimed at the fun flying market. To be Part 103 compliant, aircraft must weigh less than 254 pounds, cannot exceed 5 gallons of fuel, can carry only a single occupant, and cannot exceed 55 knots calibrated airspeed at full power in level flight. The stall speed cannot exceed 24 knots calibrated airspeed. The Ultracruiser Classic falls under Part 103, as does the new Multicruiser.

“We are showing our newest Part 103 design, multiengine airplane called the Multicruiser,” Matt said. “And we’re also showing our Ultracruiser design. It’s been around for 25 years. During AirVenture Oshkosh 2026, a group of volunteers is building an Ultracruiser at the Hummel booth to kind of demonstrate how easy it is to build one of our kits.”

Building a kit during AirVenture is not a new idea, but it remains an interesting challenge. The goal is to start with boxes of parts on Monday, and by the end of the show, the good fairies of aviation wave their magic wands and an airplane appears.

“We started Monday morning, with just parts from our kit, and we are going to finish this airplane hopefully this week with all volunteer builders. I mean, I’m helping, but these are all just people that signed up on our website to come and learn about it. So we’re hoping that kind of sheds some light on the fact that these are pretty easy to build and they’re fun,” Matt said.

“We’re building about five hours a day here for six days. We’ve got five or six volunteers, so we should be somewhere near 200 hours by the end of the week, we hope. We should have an airplane sitting here. It won’t have the engine then, obviously. But the airframe will be sitting here ready to go.”

The Ultracruiser is offered as a kit or plansbuilt ultralight, while the Hummel H5 is a light-sport aircraft that is kit or plansbuilt and is not Part 103 compliant.

“All of our kit parts [are designed] … in such a way that if you go to Cleco the thing together and it doesn’t fit, then you’ve done something wrong. All the parts are drilled [and] formed; they come to you ready to go,” he said.

There’s still the usual deburring and cleaning up parts.

“The metal is pretty light on this airplane, so deburring is more of a delicate event than maybe on a RANS or a Van’s or something,” Matt said. “Because our skins are thin. We have a really good online video series that I walk through every single step on YouTube. Every step [is] in the builder’s manual, there’s a video that goes with it.”

Affordable and aviation are not always found in the same sentence. Hummel focuses on both.

“You can build an entire airplane, including the engine prop, instruments, and everything for around $30,000, which is amazing,” Matt said. “And it’s all metal. There’s no composites, there’s no wood, there’s no fabric, no fabric. … And there’s no welding in our kits. There’s no solid riveting in our kits. We do all that for you.”

The Ultracruiser has been a popular aircraft for 25 years.

“It’s real easy to meet ultralight weight with our Ultracruiser as long as the customer follows the plans and stays very minimal with instruments and fancy stuff,” he said. “We’ve got enough left over for a real thin seat cushion. That’s about it. That fits the mission. And the mission is fun. Fun and affordability.”

The company is also introducing the new Multicruiser to the market. Also built as a kit, the Multicruiser has two counterrotating engines that produce about 23 hp each.

“They are counterrotating,” Matt said. “I was able to work with the engine manufacturer, believe it or not, and they produced one for us, counterrotating. So that tells me they must see a market.”

The company plans to offer the Multicruiser as a kit and as a ready-to-fly ultralight.

“Even though I proved I can build it to Part 103 standards, we’re gonna really recommend that everybody either has appropriate training or they build it as an experimental amateur-built,” he said. “So at least they have to have a sport pilot [certificate]. And the new MOSAIC allows multiengines, right? So that’s kind of where we’re thinking this is really going to end up.”

MOSAIC did open up a door for Hummel.

“It’s based on the Ultracruiser, so it’s based on a design that’s 25 years old. There’s some obvious changes to it if you’re an Ultracruiser connoisseur. You can tell the tail’s bigger, the rudder’s bigger, there’s some structural differences inside the aircraft, the wingspan’s a little bit bigger. The front of the airplane, obviously, looks a lot different. But it shares about 90 percent of the same components. For customers that have built an Ultracruiser in the past, [this] should feel the same to them,” Matt said.

You can find Hummel Aircraft near the ultralight runway at Booth 945 or online at HummelAircraft.com.