Who, Me? Build an Airplane?

When the Tweetie Bird flew out of my life, I thought I was through flying. Then, Tom Glaeser, a lifelong friend, came to my rescue with a new alternative.

"Oh Man-oh-man," I said to myself. "This is the worst one ever!" It was annual inspection time on Tweetie Bird, my beloved 1946 Cessna 120. The results this time were sobering. The FAA had issued a new (and expensive) airworthiness directive (AD) for the Bendix magnetos on the airplane's mighty 85-horse Continental engine, and I had to comply with it to make Tweetie airworthy again.

An AD is an innocent-looking letter from the FAA that says something on your airplane (and all the others like it) must be fixed, inspected, modified, or replaced at your expense. On top of this, Tweetie needed a transponder and altitude-reporting equipment to be legal to fly within the Kansas City Class B airspace Mode C veil. To do that, I'd have to replace her entire electrical system. It was just too expensive a project to handle.

Tweetie Bird was my first airplane. I bought her for $4,000 in 1979. I learned to fly in her, and we shared many wonderful hours together flying around the United States. She was well worth the trials and tribulations - and absolutely the only thing I could afford. Sharon (the love of my life - and keeper of the checkbook) and I were both school teachers raising a family, so we didn't have a lot of discretionary cash. But I told Sharon that owning our own plane was going to be a great financial "investment." (She'll never buy THAT one again.)

Sharon put Tweetie Bird in the "stupid expense" category, but she went with it. The only real fly in the ownership ointment was the annual trial by fire every owner of a certificated, production aircraft must endure with crossed fingers. No one told me about the annual inspection when I was looking for an airplane to buy, learn to fly in, and love. This one had been a killer - and Sharon was gonna kill me!

Depending on your airplane and your place on the financial food chain, an expensive annual inspection can break your bank account. In this case it did. I finished the annual and put Tweetie up for sale. She was on the market less than two weeks. With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat I watched her fly off to her new home in southern Missouri. She's down there now, having a ball with her new owner, far from class A, B, and C airspace.

So, there I was, planeless, desolate, and going through withdrawal. I wanted to fly! The alternatives I knew about were pretty darned limited. I could rent an airplane, or I could buy another one. I sure didn't want to invest in another production airplane because the annuals would only kill me again. Besides, the prices of used aircraft were no longer what we could afford.

Renting, for me, was out of the question because I like to fly a lot, and it would end up costing me more than owning. Besides, I'm a taildragger pilot, and there aren't a lot of taildraggers available for rent anywhere.

When the Tweetie Bird flew out of my life I thought I was through flying. Then, Tom Glaeser, a lifelong friend and A mechanic, came to my rescue with a new alternative. He suggested that I think about building my own airplane. Having already built his first airplane, a beautiful VW-powered KR-2, Tom suggested that we build two planes together. At first I pooh-poohed the idea, but Tom came up with some very persuasive reasons for building my own plane.

When you build your own aircraft, you are its FAA-certificated builder/ repairman. After the plane has passed inspection by an FAA inspector (free) or an FAA-authorized inspector (fee), you receive an FAA repairman certificate specific to your airplane. This certificate allows you to perform all the maintenance, upkeep, repairs, and annual inspections (actually, it's called the Airworthiness Condition Inspection, but homebuilders still call it the annual).

This is a leading incentive to build your own airplane, but there's a catch. You can work only on the aircraft you build. If you sell the product of your craftsmanship, your repairman certificate and authority to work on that aircraft expires, in effect.

If you use a certificated aircraft engine in your homebuilt, an A should do the engine work. You can work on it, but your work voids the engine's certificate, which means that engine can never again pull a production airplane through the sky. If you use a non-certificated engine, such as a VW-based powerplant, or any one of a large assortment of other non-certificated aircraft engines available today, you can do all the work on that engine without worry because it wasn't certificated in the first place. That will also save you a ton of money, and auto fuel is a whole lot cheaper than avgas.

That winter Tom kept extolling the virtues of homebuilding, and we consumed a lot of adult beverage trying to decide what airplanes to build. When we finally decided, stuff started happening.