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‘So what
are you doing these days?’ the Dude asks.
And I say, ‘We’re building an aeroplane.’
And the Dude responds, ‘A model plane? Yeah, yeah, I used to build them
when I was a kid, always forgot to put the windows in before I glued the fuselage
together… a real airplane? You’re kidding?’
‘Nope.’
‘What, you are actually going to build something and fly in it?’
The Dude’s eyebrows have climbed so high they have reset 29.92 by now.
‘I wouldn’t risk my ass in something I had built, no sir.’
And, once upon a time, neither would I, but that is a long story and I had better
go back to the beginning.
I have been in, on, or around aircraft since I was a small boy. I grew up with the sound of Tiger Moths in my ears, the first twin I ever flew in was a de Havilland Rapide, and though I have been more or less involved over the years, the dream of wings has never been too far away. I have flown in planes, I have owned planes, but I never even thought of building one, until I had a chance conversation in a flying club a year or so ago. Until that night, planes were things that you bought, thirty years old, nursed back into some kind of shape and then loved until you were seduced away by a younger model. Or something like that – but you didn’t build them, for all the reasons the dude was thinking of, chief among which is the absolutely incontrovertible fact that I wouldn’t risk my ass in something I had put together, either.
So why am I building an airplane, then? There are lots of reasons: I have done my time in ageing airframes; I am after a combination of good short field performance and high cruise speed that can’t easily be bought; if a new airplanes with the spec we are looking for existed, it would cost $180,000 plus; and, this being the real kicker, chances are the plane we brought home would be turn out to be a thirty year old design, dolled up for the new millennium with fancy glass instruments to distract us from the fact that nothing else had changed about it.
There are some fantastic new designs around these days, don’t get me wrong, planes like the Cirrus and the Katana, but they are expensive and tend to be aimed at a different market to people like us, who like to fly from grass strips and want to do their own maintenance. Just to give you an idea of what sort of money is involved, last time I looked, a new Lancair Columbia was $392,000, a Piper Cherokee 6 $336,000, a Cessna Skylane $297,500, and even at the bargain basement end of aviation, a Super Decathlon with a purely VFR panel was a hefty $110,000 – and that excludes delivery and any sales tax that might be applicable.
The trouble is that
your expenses don't end with buying an aircraft and maintaining, hangaring and
insuring one can easily cost $10,000 a year. Bear in mind that most of the planes
familiar to simmers have to be flown under a Certificate of Airworthiness, which
in the UK means that you have to get your 150 hour check and your annual done
by a licensed aircraft shop (what we call an M3 organisation, known in the US
as an FBO). These guys have their own overheads and since the training requirements,
pay and conditions and the blizzard of paperwork and regulation they have to
cope with aren’t exactly improving; their numbers are falling, while their
costs are rising. So at the very moment when GA is faced with a fleet largely
comprised of ageing aircraft which need the maximum amount of care and attention
to keep them flying, it is becoming harder and harder to find and afford anyone
to provide it. And that isn’t even beginning to address the issue of cowboys
in the business, of which there are a few.
It wasn’t always this way. Just after the war, you could pick up an airplane for a song, fix it up and get airside without spending a fortune, and plenty of ordinary people did exactly that. If your engine ran itself out of hours, there were plenty of replacements available and if you talk to the old-timers it seems that there was always some guy in a brown overall, who would search through the back of the shop and say, ‘Hey! I just discovered exactly what you want back here, it even has a spare set of mags in the packing case, just look at that.’ The market was flooded with pensioned off military trainers (hence those Tiger Moths I got to fly in) and when the sixties boom came in, people naturally upgraded to the new generation of planes that came along. The problem for us is that those planes are the Cessnas and Pipers you see flying around now, only on their fifth engine, with who knows how many hours on the airframe and do you have any idea where we can get hold of some door hinges, please?
Then came litigation. Just at the time when it was clear that a new generation of aircraft was needed to keep GA alive, the manufacturers were hit by a tidal wave of lawsuits that more or less cleaned them out - and their solution, devastating though it happened to be, was to stop making airplanes. When they poked their heads over the parapet again, the guys in charge were older and wiser and one thing they were definitely allergic to was taking any more risks. They had got all the bugs out of the designs they were tooled for and no way were they going back for more, so they updated the airframes a bit, deleted a few of the less popular models and went back into business – which accounts for why most people are flying around in planes which were orginally designed around the time their parents were young. Even the engines we use date back to the 1940s, the Lycoming line owing its origins more to agriculture than aviation, for example. A thin trickle of new engines is beginning to appear at long last, some from companies not traditionally associated with aviation, but GA is not a particularly big market and there is a lot of caution out there. We have learned to be traditional.
Or that is how
I used to see it. Alongside all the conventional spam can aviation, there has
been a fifth column at work, an underground movement that has changed everything,
broken every rule and yet remained largely unnoticed. It is the homebuilt and
microlight market (ultralights in the US, where most of this type of flying
is done under the auspices of the EAA). The
first time it really hit me how big this section of aviation had grown was a
day we flew to Perth in Scotland and they had a hangar full of planes that had
never had to undergo the indignity of a CofA in their lives. After that I began
to look around, read Propellerhead by Anthony Woodward (great book)
and began to realise that the reason there aren’t so many new faces in
the flying clubs nowadays is because people are having too much fun elsewhere.
But since I am old enough to value a little bit more comfort than flexwings
offer and I haven’t the patience for the sort of weight and balance issues
involved in keeping microlights/ultralights within category – not to mention
the relatively low crosswind limits on the ‘plastic pig’ generation
of planes like the Jabiru in the shot alongside – that was that, until
Len told me he had finished the empennage.
This is where the Dude would say, ‘What?’ again, and I would say, ‘the tail section, stupid,’ and he would say, ‘uh,’ and go back to whatever he was doing and not even ask what kind of a plane we are building, which is fair enough, given that I didn’t have any idea what kind of plane Len was building until I went round to see the empennage and instead of the glassfiber assembly I was expecting, there was this most beautiful duralinium construction, like a real airplane, only better. I looked it over and tried to appear like I knew what I was seeing and then I asked what it would be called when the rest of it was home and he said it was an RV9a, which left me none the wiser.
The following day I was an expert on Vans Aircraft Inc., if somewhat amazed by the fact that 3500 RVs are flying and a plane built from one of their kits is completed somewhere in the world every 48 hours. The most important thing I had discovered was that I could stop dreaming, because not only had Richard Van Grunsven got there way before me, he had exceeded my wildest possible imaginings. Here was a plane that could cruise at 160 knots, though it only stalled at 44; climbed 2000 feet per minute at solo weight; but could take off and land in 150 yards or less; and which had a range of 740 nautical miles, which is enough to fly to any one of half a dozen countries from the UK. When an RV6 arrived at our field, I bummed a ride and the only way to describe the takeoff was 'open throttle, right rudder, stick back, fly' and once in the air, it didn't so much have to be flown as it went where I was thinking. The only problem was I had to convince Len to let me on board.
A Vans kit lets
you build a modern design, using traditional materials, and the end result has
such outstanding short field performance, a high cruise speed and superb handling.
I’m not going to go into the history of how Vans got where they are today,
those of you who are interested can visit the website,
but the RV9 represents a new venture for them. Up to the RV8, all Vans planes
were designed to be fully aerobatic, which is great, but aerobatic designs can
be a little wearing to fly if travelling is your thing. So when Richard Van Grunsven
realised that significant numbers of his clients weren’t aerobating his
planes, but taking them visiting instead, he just went out and designed a tourer
– and that is the RV9. The key thing about this new airframe is that it
retains all the characteristics of the earlier RVs: notably, that it is sweet
to fly, outclimbs most of the competition, is very fuel efficient and totes
a decent payload. But above all, as long as you don’t do anything crazy
like costing your own time, it is possible to build one at a price that sounds
almost reasonable - at least by aviation's standard of reasonable. Sure, RVs
aren't everyone's ideal, the flying community is far too diverse for that, but
I had found what I was looking for.
At that moment, fortune smiled on me, because Len's son, who had been going to build the plane with him, got married. All of a sudden, Len needed an extra pair of hands and so twice a week for the last year, we have found ourselves in his garage, drilling, deburring and riveting, not to mention getting our hands covered with a substance commonly known as Black Death. We also have a third guy on board, the amazingly nice Nick. But first, I had better tell you about the economics of this thing.
There appears to be an infinite number of ways of buying a Vans' kit - as far as I know, they can even provide complete airplanes - but being an engineer, Len had opted to do the project the hard way, which meant that he had got a series of boxes containing pre-punched Duralinium sheets, 33,000 rivets, a set of plans and a tin of Thiokol, aka as Black Death and by various other, less printable names. The boxes comprising the kit are split up into 'bite size' chunks consisting of the empennage, the wings, the fuselage and what is known as the finishing kit - for an RV9a, the complete enchilada costs $17,440. If you want some of the work done for you, it is possible to buy a 'quick build kit' for around $10,000 more, but either way, you still have to source an engine and prop, fit the panel with instruments and fit some other stuff like seats and aerials, wiring, lights, switches and get the whole thing painted.
This is where
any prospective airplane builder needs to sit down and stare at the numbers,
because costs mount up frighteningly fast when you are building a plane. Seventeen
grand doesn't look so bad, but a new 160 hp Lycoming EA O-320-D1A is $22,000
(to which you can add at least another $5,000 for hoses, cables, an exhaust
system, mags and all) and a metal prop is around $2,000. It is possible to save
a fair bit by buying a mid-time engine, but bearing in mind that no-one sells
an engine without a good reason, your mileage can vary on this one. However,
this money is chicken feed compared to what you could blow on populating the
panel. A full 'FS2004 compliant' set of instruments including the obligatory
Garmin 430/530 combination, autopilot, dual VORs, ILS, DME, ADF, paired flip
flop radios, top end transponder, audio switch panel and french fries would
be way over $50,000, so we didn't go for that. Our altogether more modest panel
will still cost us the thick end of $10,000 and that is with only a single Bendix
King KX155a in it, a color Skymap IIIc GPS (more practical than the Garmins
for our type of flying), a VOR/ILS and standard engine instruments.
The Vans website cost estimator reckons we could get the plane finished for a shade over $57,000, either things cost more in the UK or the calculation is a little optimistic. My guess is we will end up spending nearly $80,000 and that is without going overboard on anything. Yeah, it is a lot of money, but now we are around half-way through the build, I'm beginning to understand why aircraft cost what they do, and a Super Decathlon for $110,000 begins to look like something of a bargain. Funny how attitudes change, isn't it? If you had asked me three years ago if I would sink the best part of $30,000 into flying, I would have taken you round to get checked out, but I have always lived on the principle of carpe diem and this seemed too good an opportunity to miss, even if it was likely to involve some sacrifices. While, as my father once told me, if God had intended man to fly, he would have given him more money, I guess there is no substitute for saving hard.
We are now 500 man hours into the project and in the next piece, I will tell you about how we have gone about it.
Andrew Herd