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The F8F Bearcat was Grumman's answer to a single demand from combat veterans: climb faster. After roughly 18 months analyzing Pacific air combat, the team settled on a simple formula — bolt the most powerful American piston engine available, the 2,000-hp Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, into the smallest, lightest airframe that could still survive carrier landings. The internal designation was G-58, and development began in late 1943.

They started from the F6F Hellcat and cut everything they could. The fuselage came out about 5 ft shorter and was lowered behind the cockpit for a bubble canopy — the first on any U.S. Navy fighter — while the wingspan shrank 7 ft. A 12 ft 7 in four-bladed Aeroproducts propeller replaced the Hellcat's three-bladed unit, internal fuel was capped at 160 U.S. gallons to save weight, and armament was held to four .50-cal Brownings.

The XF8F-1 prototype first flew on 21 August 1944 and entered U.S. Navy service on 21 May 1945 — too late for World War II. Grumman and Eastern Aircraft built 1,265 in all. The type later flew for France in Indochina, then Thailand and South Vietnam, which retired it in 1963. Its second life was on the racecourse: heavily modified Bearcats set piston-engine speed records, and one — Rare Bear — reached 528.33 mph in 1989, a mark that still stands.

The LA-4-200 Buccaneer is a four-seat, all-metal amphibian — one of the very few light aircraft purpose-built to operate routinely from both paved runways and open water. Its lineage runs back to the Colonial C-1 Skimmer, a three-seat flying boat developed in Sanford, Maine by designer David Thurston. Thurston stretched it into the four-seat C-2; when the brand became Lake Aircraft in 1959, the design gained a four-foot-wider wingspan, a revised nose, and reinforced wing structure, earning FAA type certification on 26 July 1960 as the LA-4 Amphibian.

The Buccaneer arrived in 1970, when Lake swapped the 180-hp Lycoming O-360 for a fuel-injected 200-hp IO-360. Gross weight rose 200 lb to 2,690 lb, and new sponson tanks (7.5 US gallons a side) lifted fuel capacity from 40 to 55 US gallons. The engine sits on a pylon above the hull in pusher configuration, keeping the propeller clear of spray during water operations — the detail that sets the Lake apart from tractor-engined floatplanes. The tricycle gear retracts fully into the single-step hull.

From the flight manual: stall 45 mph, never-exceed 154 mph, range 825 miles, service ceiling 14,700 ft. More than 1,000 were built across the LA-4 and Buccaneer lines. In 1982 a stretched six-seat derivative, the Renegade, followed with a 250-hp or turbocharged 270-hp engine and a longer hull; a military patrol version was marketed as the Seawolf.

The Cozy MK IV is a four-seat, single-engine, plans-built canard homebuilt designed by Nat Puffer and derived — with Burt Rutan's explicit approval — from Rutan's two-seat Long-EZ. Puffer introduced it in 1991 and the prototype first flew in 1993. Plans and prefabricated parts come from Aircraft Spruce, but it is strictly plans-built: the builder sources raw materials and fabricates the structure by hand, not from a kit.

The airframe is a foam-and-fiberglass sandwich bonded with epoxy: wing cores hot-wire-cut from blue styrofoam, compound curves like the nose hand-carved from urethane foam, and bulkheads from PVC foam sheet. The recommended engine is a 180-hp Lycoming O-360, though builders have fitted 160 to 220 hp — and at least one example flies on twin Suzuki automobile engines driving contra-rotating propellers.

Like its Long-EZ ancestor, it is a canard: the small forward wing stalls before the main wing can, making a full aerodynamic stall physically impossible. The main gear is fixed and the nose gear retracts, so with the front seats empty the center of gravity sits aft of the main wheels and the aircraft rests nose-down when parked — the “grazing” pose inherited from the Long-EZ. There are no flaps; a retractable belly board slows it on approach. About 350 had been completed worldwide by 2015.