The first Liberty XL2 was delivered to the company’s first private buyer in December.
Retired American Airlines captain Thomas Sams and his wife, Mary Jane, live at South Lake, Texas. Sams has logged some 23,000 hours with the airline, as a CAE SimuFlite instructor and privately, said Liberty’s president and CEO Tony Tiarks, who sees that background as “validation of the aircraft’s outstanding design and performance.”
The delivery was something of an aviation milestone. Sams’s XL2 is powered by the first production engine from Teledyne Continental with Aerosance PowerLink FADEC, which prompted Continental’s president, Bryan Lewis, to comment that “We are grateful for the leadership demonstrated by Liberty in selecting this advanced technology for the XL2.” Lewis expressed the belief that PowerLink FADEC is destined to become an industry standard for its “operational simplicity, performance enhancements and maintenance simplifications.”