The Eppo Windmaster is a unique machine specially designed to fulfil the mission of a North Atlantic crossing. The wing is a standard Raven X wing manufactured by Medway Microlights of Rochester England. The pod or trike suspended underneath the wing is a modified Southdown International two-place trike which Numan hired Yugoslav sculptor Franja Mora to design. At the outset Mora, who now lives in Holland, estimated it'd take them approximately three weeks to make a mould for the cockpit, which is fabricated from Kevlar. Like most other parts of this expedition, however, building the trike didn't go as smoothly as planned either. Three months later, the first plug was completed. When it was finally finished, building the trike had occupied nearly 15 months of full time work.

Power for the Windmaster is a Limbach four cylinder horiz- ontally oppos- ed four stroke engine with dual magnetos driving a Muhlbauer MT 63 x 31 1/2 inch pitch propeller.

(Numan carried a spare propeller on his trike on many legs of the trip. Leading edges of both propellers were inlaid with steel to prevent damage when taking off from gravel runways.)

Because the trike was specially designed, mounting the engine on the pylon tube, which is the usual engine position on a trike, would have seated the engine too far back. Thus a separate engine mount was required - another time consuming and tedious job

Numan's original machine which fell into the Mediterranean was powered by a Fuji-Robin engine. In the course of building the second trike, Numan was swayed to use the Limbach engine, which he says performed flawlessly. However, because of the extra instruments necessary for that engine, the final weight of the machine reached 189 kg. (416 lbs ), 39 kg. more than the 150 kg. total for which Numan was aiming. That necessitated Numan's registering the machine as an ultralight in France, where the upper limit for ultralights is 200 kg., thus the registration F28A0. Numan himself holds both Dutch and French microlight licenses.

Fuel on board the Windmaster was carried in a fibreglass seat tank with a capacity of 135 litres (approximately 39 gallons), enough for approximately 11 hours of flight at an average cruise speed of 60 mph.

Navigation instruments on the weight shift ultralight included a Ilmorrow Loran, King ADF, Hamilton vertical card compass, transponder, altimeter, turn and bank indicator, gyro compass, air speed indicator and Dittel 720 channel radio. Engine instruments included CHT, oil temperature and pressure gauges, hand throttle, foot throttle, choke, electric fuel pump, amp meter, fuel gauge, starter, generator, tachometer, carburettor heating system, 12-volt dry cell battery and Bendix Magneto switch

One of the main pieces of survival equipment Numan carried on board the Windmasten was a survival life raft with hood (inside which was housed a compartment carrying various bandages, medicine, and emergency food and water rations). Numan wore this life raft strapped to his chest during all legs of the flight. ("For example," Numan says. "if I'd gone down while overflying Greenland. I could have used the life raft with its hood as a tent for warmth until rescuers arrived.") Other survival gear included underarm life vests, an ELT with extra battery, survival knife, smoke flares and signal rockets - all of which was carried on or in the flying suit which Numan wore at all times. Numan chose not to equip the machine with a ballistic chute because of the added weight.

One example of the thought and preparations which Numan put into planning this expedition is a roller map device which he designed to keep his maps from flying all over the North Atlantic. The Plexiglass box encased map strips wound around two rollers at each end which allowed him to roll the map along as he completed each leg of the flight. The only problem with this device was that it required Numan cut all his maps and tape them together to form a single strip for each leg, a task which sometimes became tedious work.