The Sling Squawk – June 2026
7 Jun 2026
“I met Linda Sollars, A320 Captain and renaissance woman, at Oshkosh last year while I was wandering around admiring the vast array of planes. I’d been following the development of Slings for about 10 years and when I passed ‘Sling Island’ I saw her sitting in her High Wing (HW) Sling 4 chatting to people. She’d flown in from Michigan the day before, where she’d had the original Rotax 915 iS engine replaced with a 160 hp turbocharged fuel-injected Rotax 916.
It was now two years after she’d personally flown the HW from the Sling Factory in South Africa to Oshkosh in 2022 and that was nine months after she’d commenced a full self-build of the plane at the Sling factory near Johannesburg. But her amazing story goes way, way further back than that. I was so intrigued by our five-minute chat that I arranged to sit down with her for a one on one in depth interview the following day.”
– Philip Arthur (Air Chat)
The adventure begins! A month. A fleet of gorgeous aircraft. One unforgettable adventure across Southern Africa with Josh Flowers, Chelsea Smith, their good friends Chris Lammert and Keelyn Costello, and some of us from Sling HQ. In Part 1 of Aviation101’s four-part series, the journey starts with their arrival in South Africa at Sling HQ in the south of Johannesburg, meeting the aircraft that will become their companions, ZU-TSI and ZU-DFU, and taking the first steps — or rather, first flights — into the unknown.