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I'm a life-long airplane nut who happens to be married to a wonderful woman who tolerates my enthusiasm for all things
aeronautic. She even likes flying with me, so I guess I'm pretty lucky compared to many who share this particular
addiction.
My home town is Dayton, Ohio, where my grandmother lived in the same neighborhood as the Wright Brothers
when she was a little girl, and she knew the Wright family. My father was an engineer at what was then known as Wright
Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base), and among other things led early work on the first US ejection seat at the end
of WWII. I remember clearly when I was perhaps four or five years old, my dad built a small blue and yellow free flight
model, and flew it over the corn fields of my grandfather's farm. The sight and sound of that model climbing up
and up into the blue summer sky until the engine quit, then drifting away in lazy circles, remains with me to this day.
I suppose that's where it all started.
I built models of all types while I was growing up, though most were
rubber powered. We didn't have a lot of money, and my small allowance wouldn't purchase more than a couple
of glow-ignition engines over the years. So, it was gliders and rubber-powered models, plastic kits, a few .049-size
control line types, one Wakefield, even a try at crude indoor models (covered with condenser paper and flown outdoors on calm
days). Later, my dad bought one of the early single-channel radio control systems and put it in a small rudder-only
plane that we used to fly at the local park when I was in high school.
I studied electrical engineering
at the University of Cincinnati, which was (and still is) a co-op university. That is, we worked for a quarter and went
to school for a quarter, alternating work and study on a five-year degree program that gave me enough
income to pay for school, buy a car and get a private pilot's license.
When I graduated,
we were in the midst of the Viet Nam War, so I signed up to join the Navy while I was in my senior year. After
graduation, it was off to Pensacola for Aviation Officers' Candidate School. My eyesight was just outside the tolerance
to be a Navy pilot at the time, so I became a Naval Flight Officer and flew as a Tactical Coordinator in P-3 Orions. After
one active duty tour, with a wife and small child, I decided to leave active duty and went to work for Electronic
Data Systems, back when it was still majority-owned by Ross Perot. Ross Perot's public image suffered a bit
under the media scrutiny of a presidential campaign, but he was probably the most inspirational single individual I've
ever met, and I'll let it go at that.
After seven years at EDS and ten or twelve relocations, we decided
to look for something more stable, and I found a job with Boeing in the Seattle area. I stayed in the Naval Reserve
throughout, eventually becoming C.O. of P-3 squadron VP-69 at NAS Whidbey Island. I'm now retired from both the
Naval Reserve and Boeing, but have returned to Boeing as a contract employee. My Boeing career has been centered on
maritime patrol aircraft systems and software development, including nearly eight years in the United Kingdom working on the
Nimrod MRA4 aircraft project, and have been working on the P-8A program at Boeing for the past two years. The P-8A is
based on the Boeing 737 airframe, and will one day replace the aging P-3 fleet.
My personal flying activity has
included the acquisition of commercial, instrument, multi-engine, instructor and instrument instructor ratings with my GI
Bill benefits during the first few years after my active duty tour. Later I added a commercial glider rating, and most
of my flying for the past several years has been in gliders.
I think gliding makes flying a truly enjoyable
and affordable sporting pastime. After an hour of boring holes in the sky or shooting touch and goes in a power aircraft
(and thinking about how much money you are spending), power flying gets boring pretty quickly if you aren't going somewhere
or seeing something new. In a glider, however, you can launch at noon, stay up for four or five hours and never leave
sight of the home airport, but the whole time can be fun and simulating. There's just something about watching that
altimeter needle climb with no engine pulling you up, and the constant mental challenge of working the current lift while thinking
about finding the next patch, that keeps you on your toes and provides a real sense of satisfaction.
Building my
own full-size aircraft has been a personal goal for forty years or so. I joined EAA while I was in college and
acquired some early homebuilt aircraft information packets, back when all you could get were rolled drawings
and little else from the designer. It was then up to you to figure out where to buy materials and acquire the necessary
building skills. As for most people who aspire to build a homebuilt aircraft, career, family and home intervened
for a long time, but eventually I bought a set of Skybolt plans in 1972 and started cutting and welding steel tubing.
Progress was slow to stopped for a few years and I carted the fuselage side frames through three house moves before eventually
deciding that a two-place open cockpit biplane just wasn't practical for me and my family. I sold the Skybolt project
and bought a BD-4 kit that had been partially completed by a high school shop class. Before I got very far on that effort,
however, I decided that I just wasn't happy with the workmanship that had preceded mine, so I sold that one, too.
Meanwhile, Burt Rutan had sprung the Varieze and LongEZ on the homebuilt community, then Nat Puffer came up with
the 3-place Cozy. I bought a set of plans for that airplane, but between a demanding job at Boeing and a second career
in the Naval Reserve, there just wasn't time to commence construction. Nat also began work on a 4-place version,
then announced that he was going to offer plans. I bought one of the first sets of plans for the Cozy MKIV, but they
languished until my retirement from the Naval Reserve in 1995 gave me some free time. I started the Cozy in 1996 and
made reasonably steady progress for a few years, during which our kids grew up and moved away, so the need diminished greatly
for a 4-place 200 mph cross country aircraft that was going to take me another five years to complete.
So,
that's why I'm building this particular aircraft. My objectives have changed and I'm turning the Cozy
project over to my son to complete. The Cozy is scratch-built except for a few prefab metal bits and pieces, and with
over 2,000 hours invested in that project so far, I figure I'm about half done, even though the airframe is nearly complete.
The Pipistrel, however, is a much more highly prefabricated kit, which you can see for yourself by looking at the kit build
manual on the Pipistrel web sites.
I still enjoy model aircraft -- mostly radio control in recent
years, and lately electric-powered versions. They are quiet, clean, and the weight and power density of the battery-motor
combinations is now equivalent to glow engines. The advances in battery chemistry now available on a small scale make
me optimistic about the near-term potential for an economically viable move away from oil as the basis for daily personal
transportation. But that's another whole discussion....
I initially figured that I could possibly get
my Pipistrel done in time to fly it to Oshkosh Airventure 2007, but that was optimistic in light of other things that I need
to spend my time on. I tell people that if I were building a second example, working on it full time and taking advantage
of everything I'm learning on this one, that I could get it done in a month, and I still think that's realistic.
But few people build more than one aircraft, and fewer still build the same type aircraft more than once. Most will
find, as I have, that the kit is very complete and very high quality, but it takes time to study, understand and complete
all the construction tasks the first time around. I think six to thelve months of construction time is a reasonable
estimate -- more than that if you don't keep at it steadily, and less if you have nothing else to do with your time.
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This is me, my son, Jon, and my grandson, Amal, at Oshkosh 2005 in front
of Space Ship One. We had a great time and brought home a lot of memories. Jon and I flew to Oshkosh from Washington
State in a Piper Arrow in 1991 when he was still in high school. That was a real adventure -- camping with the plane
at airports along the way, sharing the whole aviation experience, and seeing a lot of America from the air. I look forward
to doing a lot more recreational sight-seeing with the Sinus, while enjoying soaring opportunities around this beautiful country.
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