Pipestrel

The program I am involved in here provides top Slovenian university students with four-week internships in U.S. companies operating in Ljubljana.  The U.S. Embassy and Amcham (the American Chamber of Commerce in Ljubljana) teamed up to create the program, which is mainly geared toward science and engineering students.  The idea is to give these students work experience and some background in business, with the overall goal of promoting economic literacy in the next generation of workforce.  Each Monday, the students meet for class with me in the morning and then head out for a site visit in the afternoon.  What a fantastic group of students by the way.

Yesterday (day one of the program), our site visit was to Pipestrel, which is widely regarded as the top ultra-light aircraft manufacturer in the world.  It’s a great story… it was started in the mid-1980’s in what was then Yugoslavia by Ivo Boscarol, who was an amateur pilot.  He smuggled his first “trike” plane part by part into Yugoslavia from Italy for himself and then began building them for his friends.  Later, he was able to get a business license from Belgrade for manufacturing small aircraft by passing an exam he wrote himself (the Yugoslav authorities called Ivo’s local airstrip director and asked for an expert on small aircraft…the director referred them to Ivo), and became the first light-aircraft manufacturer in Yugoslavia.

The name Pipestrel comes from the Latin word for bat.  This is what the locals called the original trike planes Ivo and his friends flew since they were shaped like bats and only flew around dusk (the only time the local airstrip director would let them fly was after the airstrip was closed, so he “wouldn’t know what they were doing”).

I was definitely impressed.  The facility they have, the planes they produce, everything is very advanced, a case study on vision and innovation.  So advanced, in fact, that Larry Page showed up unannounced last year to talk about a project on which Google would like to work with them.

The woman giving us the tour told us their typical customer is a 40-year-old man who is “having a second puberty.”  She was looking at me when she said it…