Still, it is a 3,140-pound boat, and as much power as can be mustered is appreciated. So the turbocharger makes sense for a pilot who wants everything on his flying boat optimized. The airplane is also available without a turbocharger.
In flying the Turbo
Renegade, I came away with a feeling that this is almost as good as it can get.
If you started from scratch today and threw tens of millions of dollars at a
new flying boat design, it would be difficult to make measurable improvements
or to come away with a lot more utility. And this airplane is based on an old
design. It originally took form at Grumman, to enter the immediate post-World
War II market. That company had other light airplane designs as well (after
their success with cats in World War 11, some wags said their general aviation
airplanes would be the Alleycat and the Pussycat), but the corporate decision
was to opt out of the market. The little amphib eventually became the Colonial
Skimmer, built by former Grumman employees. That evolved into Lake Aircraft
Corporation, where the airplane was tweaked into its present form, and it
remains a viable product more than 40 years after the start, just like the
Beech Bonanza.
The evolution to the Renegade,
with a three-foot stretch in the fuselage and a new shape for the hull was a
major step for relatively small Lake Aircraft, which currently builds four
airplanes a month. It was a whole new Part 23 certification under the watchful
eye of a Federal Aviation Administration that has no experience in certifying
flying boats. The pages in the rule book on boats were apparently written with
knowledge only of theory, and in the certification process there were long
periods of inactivity because nobody in the FAA knew what to do next. The
result was that it took three years to certify an airplane that, structurally,
reflected the experience gained building 1,200 airplanes that are flying
world-wide.
Insurance is a big question
on seaplanes, because it is a double risk, a combination of a boat and an
airplane. Lake addresses this with a training and an insurance program. The
training is thorough, takes a week, and graduates a pilot with 25 hours in the
airplane and a day in the classroom. The hull insurance rate is then three to
four percent of the value until the pilot has 1,000 hours total and 200 in a
Lake, at which time the rate drops to about two percent.
