(CNN) — It wasn’t until he moved near to an airfield in the UK over a decade ago that mechanical engineer Ashok Aliseril Thamarakshan began to seriously consider learning to fly a plane.
He got his first taste of flying a few years later, when his wife Abhilasha bought him a 30-minute flight experience for his birthday.
Aliseril, who is based in English county Essex, booked in some flying lessons at a local airfield and flew to the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England, during his first session.
“That was quite an eye opener into how it [flying] gives you the freedom to just go places if you have that ability, and access to an aircraft,” he tells CNN Travel. “So that really got me hooked.”
Aliseril got his private pilot’s license in 2019 and soon began hiring planes for short flights.
Amateur build
Engineer Ashok Aliseril, with his daughter Diya, spent 18 months building a four-seater plane during the pandemic.
Courtesy Ashok Thamarakshan
But as his family grew — he and Abhilasha now have two daughters, the two-seater planes typically available for private hire became even less suitable, and he began to mull over the idea of buying his own plane.
Aliseril briefly considered buying an older aircraft, and looked at some that had been built in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, he says he felt uneasy about the prospect of flying his family in an older aircraft that he wasn’t familiar with, and didn’t think it would be a “comfortable journey.”
Aliseril began to look into the possibility of building a plane himself, reasoning that this would allow him to gain a better understanding of the aircraft so that it would be easier to maintain in the long term.
After researching self-assembly aircraft kits, he came across a four-seater plane manufactured by South African company Sling Aircraft that ticked all the right boxes.
“This was pre Covid, where travel was still very easy at the time,” he explains. “I ordered the first kit when I got back. And by the time it arrived, the UK was in full lockdown.”
Aliseril says his colleagues, some of whom had experience with building aircraft, initially offered to help with the build. But the restrictions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, which had spread across the world by this point, meant that this wasn’t…
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