Originally Posted by
cluttonfred
Hi, Chris, and welcome. You're right that that's a pretty tough list of criteria to meet. Very few kits or even designs built from plans are available today with retractable gear, and not many are available with tandem seating. Conventional wisdom is that retractable gear is not really worth the effort in most casecs below about 200 mph. If you knock that one criterion out then there are several current kits that would work for you--Van's RV-4 or RV-8/8A, Harmon Rocket II (a modified Van's RV-4) come time mind and there are probably more. Likewise, if you go to side-by-side seating, there are Lancair and Glasair options with retractable gear and probably others I'm not thinking of since it's not really my kind of plane. There are some older plansbuilt designs that come close, but something like a Brokaw Bullet is a big, long project and Brokaw has long since gone West. All of this begs the question...what's your budget (all of these are going to be pushing 100k fully equipped) and how do you want to use the plane? Cheers, Matthew