Former aircrew members of the Woking branch of the Aircrew Association, meeting
at the Flight Centre at Fairoaks Airport last month, were treated to a
fascinating account by David Lockspeiser, a former Hawker Test Pilot, of his
development of a basic "maid of all work" agricultural aircraft, which he had
designed twenty five years ago to be easily built and maintained by unskilled
labour in developing countries.
LDA-01 development aircraft in flight
Before his flying career in the Royal Air Force and at Hawkers, David had
trained as an aircraft engineer. After he retired from Hawkers, he set up his
own aircraft company to develop a cheap aircraft to meet this requirement, and
so the concept of the Boxer LDA-1000 was born. Because he couldn't afford the
outlay to build a full size prototype, he built first a 70% full size
prototype, called the Land Development Aircraft (LDA-01), to prove the
conceptual design. In its initial form, it had a four wheeled undercarriage,
and it was designed with a very flexible centre of gravity, so that it could
safely take off and land with any loading arrangement within the fuselage, to
avoid the need for any skilled loading calculations.
Model of the proposed Boxer 1000 production aircraft
Great ingenuity was shown in designing the wings, elevator and fins to be
interchangeable standard units built with the minimum possible number of
different jigs; and the wings could be dismounted and stowed alongside the
fuselage for easy transport by road, and reassembled at the airstrip. The
fuselage was built in three sections, with different load-carrying centre
sections, for crop-spraying, aerial photography, or passenger carrying - for 6
passengers in the planned full size version. The latest version of the Land
Development Aircraft was fitted with a three-wheeled undercarriage and a 160
horse power engine, which gave it a cruising speed of 125-130 knots; and it was
painted in military colours on one side and civil colours on the other side,
for demonstration at the Paris Air Show! Sadly, no production company could be
found to take up this original idea, and a full size version was never built.
