This plane is amazing!
Excuse me for not joining the oooh-aah-wow chorus. Put in a lot of power and any airframe will impress. Just like any woman can have some success with enough make-up and a sufficiently short skirt.
The basic Impulse is sexy enough as it is – I have one for a hangar neighbour. No need to so grossly overdo things.
What can one actually DO with this thing, except impress the neighbours? Cleared for acro? That would be spectacular, I’ll allow. Go travelling? With a passenger and any kind of luggage? IFR equipment? Oh no, it’s an experimental, no IFR in Europe (according to some).
And what’s the cost of getting one, and of keeping it, and of flying it?
It was made to have fun with it. I don’t see a problem with that idea. I like it a lot.
There appears to be no forward visibility when taxiing
Peter wrote:
There appears to be no forward visibility when taxiing
Welcome to the world of high performance tail wheel aircraft, and antiques as well. Much of learning to fly them is learning to accommodate this issue, and on some of them the same lack of forward visibility when on final approach and landing.
achimha wrote:
Rate of Climb at 80 kts 6200 ft/ min
That’s almost straight up!
61kts of that 80kts is vertical speed!
What about endurance? 15 or 20 minutes?
It’s quite sexy looking, but apparently the airframe is not as aerodynamically good as it looks – 255 kts seems low for a 450 hp engine and ~500 kg MTOW. Also, the prop is visibly above the wing, and with this insane amount of engine power available, reducing thrust may cause a pitch-up, which is dangerous at low airspeeds and was a contributing factor in some fatal crashes of BD-5, which had the same issue.
255kt IAS would be excellent. That’s a TAS of some 400kt at some altitude, which will likely generate some “interesting” flutter issues 
I am not trying to say 255 kt is poor. It’s very good indeed, but one can achieve that with a much smaller engine.
