An introduction to homebuilts. (Send this link to the uninformed)

I just wrote an article that is a general overview of homebuilt airplanes, focusing on kitplanes. It aims to fill the biggest gaps in the knowledge of the general population when it comes to this kind of airplane. So many people think that we're crazy for flying homebuilts, think that they are completely unregulated... and have no appreciation for how well-established the industry is, how diligently we tackle safety issues, and how amazing these airplanes are when compared to most factory-built machines.

Enjoy!

http://onebcnf.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/an-introduction-to-homebuilt-kitplanes/

(Oh, and feel free to send me any feedback you may have. I could tweak the article if there is anything incorrect, important stuff missing, etc).

Nice article.

Tim

Well Done..

..IMO, we need more articles like this, and they need to be printed in MAINSTREAM publications.

Very well done!

That needs to go into a lot of news papers. very well written.

Nice article. Minor point - you can now change "over seven thousand RV's flying" to something like "over eight and a half thousand". (8,642 currently).

I would love to share it! Can we?

warbirds

Nice article. Most US manufactured warbirds are certified in the Limited category. Examples are P51 and Douglas Invader. Although this category does not permit operation for hire, exemptions are issued for passenger ride programs. Examples are EAA, Collings Foundation and CAF, along with several others.
Foreign warbirds are usually certified Experimental Exhibition when registered in the US. At least some foreign OPERATED warbirds are US registered.

Thanks for the clarification on the warbirds. I'll fix the article to be a little more accurate.

Paul K said:

I would love to share it! Can we?

Click to expand...

Share away! I'd appreciate it if you share by linking to the original, rather than quoting (i.e. copy-pasting) from it. Part of the reason why I wrote it where I did (on the BCnF blog) was to give Boeing's Glasair project a little more exposure.

(They're doing their first power-on in a few days. First flight should be in about a month. They're hoping to make it to Oshkosh, which has motivated me to decide to go as well... Anyways, I'll probably write one or two more articles for them in the near future).

Very good!
Thank you!

The first FAA Certified composite aircraft was the GA Windecker Eagle in 1969. Very nice article

Maybe Paul Dye would like to incorporate this into Kitplanes.
Just a thought.

Pat Garboden
Katy, TX
RV9A N942PT

Great article. I've just passed it onto a friend who is a Transport Canada employee.
Question - the stat about the accident rate for homebuilts being "less than 1% higher" than for certified light aircraft, it would be REALLY nice to have a reference to the actual data/statistic, and not just to an EEA website claiming that stat. That's an awesome stat to use, so we'd like to be able to point to something authoritative.

Time to build???

Bernardo.
Great article, and your hit most of the needed points.
However I feel you greatly mis-represented the time it takes to
build an EAB. Dispite the Two Weeks to Taxi and Lancair factory programs,
the only plane I know of that can be competed in less than a thousand hours is the RV-12, and then only by an experienced builder.

I spent 2200 hrs on my RV-9A, and that was typical. Do you know how many hours it took to build your 6A???? I bet it was at least as long as I took to build mine.

anyone deciding to build an EAB, no matter which kit he/she chooses, needs to committ to a long, sometimes difficult or confusing, but always interesting process.

Completion is a matter of persistence. But most of us take years to do it.
and, by the way....its all well worth it!
Jim Frisbie, RV-9A, 350 hrs

prkaye said:

Question - the stat about the accident rate for homebuilts being "less than 1% higher" than for certified light aircraft, it would be REALLY nice to have a reference to the actual data/statistic, and not just to an EEA website claiming that stat. That's an awesome stat to use, so we'd like to be able to point to something authoritative.

Click to expand...

I will admit that the statistic is misleading. If the accident rate (e.g. reportable accidents per airplane per year, or something like that) is zero-point-something percent for factory-built single-engine airplanes, and around one percent for EABs, this means that the EAB accident rate is "less than one percent greater" than the EAB accident rate... if the accident rates are expressed in a way that makes both of them less than one percent. Relative to the accident rate in factory-built airplanes, the accident rate in EABs is greater by... what is it, 10%, 20%? But that makes it sound higher than it is, since some people might thing that the 20% is absolute (i.e. they might interpret it as "20% of EABs get into an accident each year" or something outrageous like that).

I didn't really know how to phrase these statistics in a way that was concise, easy to interpret, and positive (i.e. emphasizing that these airplanes are not unsafe). I did my best. But I am open to suggestions, and I'll keep thinking about it, and maybe I'll revise the article in the future if I see or think of a better way to phrase things.

I would suggest you could say what you already do ("less than 1 percent higher...) and then in parentheses put the specific rates per flight hour (or whatever) for each of certified light and homebuilt. This would make it clear what you're claiming.
My point, however, is that I'd love to see a reference to the actual source data/study from which these numbers are taken.

accidents

The accident rate for EAB is very difficult to make sense of. While the NTSB/FAA seems to be doing a better job of separating true EAB from other experimental in the last year or two, there is still some very misleading information in the reports.
One arbitrary example: engine failure on takeoff(phase 1), aircraft lands safely, no damage. This doesn't even require a report. Same situation, but aircraft crashes fatally. NTSB may cite loss of control or they may cite a fuel system problem or both.
I did a personal study of EAB accidents for I believe 2009, which at the time was the last year where all the available reports were final. Using 150 statute m/h cruise as an arbitrary dividing line between high performance and low performance aircraft, ALL of the fatal high performance accidents for that year were loss of control. Some may have been preceded by a power loss, but the cause of the fatality was loss of control.
There are also other circumstances involved in a few accidents each year, such as alcohol and drugs, both prescription. In these cases, what difference does it make if the aircraft involved is certified or EAB.
The bottom line for me is that the current EAB statistics are almost meaningless.
I have been flying EAB for more than fifty years, several thousand hours in EAB. I have never hurt myself in an EAB.
Using the Pitts as an example, it doesn't make any difference to me if it is an EAB S1S or a factory certified S1S. In fact, if it a meticulously built EAB I feel safer in the EAB.

accidents

I proof read and still made an error. Drugs should read both prescription and illegal.

I see Boing Boing picked it up today.

Also the Vari-EZ was the first Burt Rutan full composite aircraft. The LongEZ was an improvement to the VariEZ design.

Bob

AirShowFan said:

I will admit that the statistic is misleading. If the accident rate (e.g. reportable accidents per airplane per year, or something like that) is zero-point-something percent for factory-built single-engine airplanes, and around one percent for EABs, this means that the EAB accident rate is "less than one percent greater" than the EAB accident rate... if the accident rates are expressed in a way that makes both of them less than one percent. Relative to the accident rate in factory-built airplanes, the accident rate in EABs is greater by... what is it, 10%, 20%? But that makes it sound higher than it is, since some people might thing that the 20% is absolute (i.e. they might interpret it as "20% of EABs get into an accident each year" or something outrageous like that).

I didn't really know how to phrase these statistics in a way that was concise, easy to interpret, and positive (i.e. emphasizing that these airplanes are not unsafe). I did my best. But I am open to suggestions, and I'll keep thinking about it, and maybe I'll revise the article in the future if I see or think of a better way to phrase things.

Click to expand...

Focus on the statistics post Phase testing. Reference the AOPA NALL report. They actually have some nice statistics in there.

But at the end of the day, you are addressing the concept of fear (mostly fear of the unknown) which is an emotion. I would therefore skip the statistics completely.

Tim

tspear said:

But at the end of the day, you are addressing the concept of fear (mostly fear of the unknown) which is an emotion. I would therefore skip the statistics completely.

Tim

Click to expand...

I agree. Stats are only useful for those wishing to prove their point to those who already hold their position. The fearful have no use for statistics, their concerns need to be addressed on a more emotional level.

Ditch the stats and this "problem" of how to present them goes away.

Nice article!

Addressing fear of flying

Thank you, Tim and Sam. I totally agree with you that fear of flying (be it flying in airliners or in single-engine airplanes) is an emotion and that it cannot be tamed by statistics.

To be perfectly honest, the main audience of my article was Boeing employees. When being exposed for the first time to the idea of homebuilts, their question of "Is it safe?" is not the nervous question of someone about to ride an airplane for the first time (or about to go bungee-jumping or skydiving). It will be a more cold and detached question asked from an engineering or even legal point of view, as in "My company is sponsoring some employees to build and fly a kitplane. Should I be worried? What are the odds of this ending catastrophically?". I do think that this kind of concern can be addressed by statistics, so I provided them (and links to the Nall reports, which I agree are terrific).

When it comes to the average person's fears, on the other hand, my take on it is what I explain in forums like this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1ktd00/i_need_your_help_on_safety_datastatistics/cbslayf

http://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/co...ne_who_flies_regularly_and_has_always/ceft4rq

In short: If people can easily imagine scary accidents in single-engine airplanes (to the point where the image of the scary accident over-rides anything else in their mind when they think about - or engage in - riding such vehicles) then they will FEEL like it's a big risk, whether or not that's true. And the same thing probably applies to fear of flying in airliners. It doesn't matter what the statistics are, or how the causes of accidents can be divided into bad design versus bad manufacturing versus bad maintenance versus pilot error... all that matters in the person's mind is "Holy , this or this might happen, and that's terrifying!!!". I think that the only way to help such people overcome their fears might be to expose them to lots and lots of uneventful flights, maybe encourage them to watch movies and TV shows where flying light airplanes is done repeatedly and safely (Flying Wild Alaska, Bush Pilots, etc.), to keep talking about how last week you flew over here and this week you flew over there, etc. But even that might not work, because strong fears are not rational and most people do not want to invest the effort it takes to overcome them. (Just this past weekend, my mother visited me from the east coast, and yet again I failed to convince her to go up in the RV with me... Which clearly means you should take all of my opinions on this matter with a huge grain of salt!)

Composites history

Also, thanks everyone for the corrections on the first composite airplanes. In the past I had heard some exaggerated claims about the Glasair and the LongEZ, and I now see that they're not accurate. I have revised the article accordingly.

I now look forward to reading more about the Windecker Eagle (I had never heard of it), the VariEZ (I had heard of it but thought it was basically a LongEZ prototype, rather than an airplane all its own), and the early composite gliders. As someone who develops structural analysis (and to a lesser extent, structural design) methods for a living, I would really love to learn about the pioneering work of the people who were among the first to try and analyze the strength of composite structure, to predict how well some structure would do, and to design accordingly. In my experience, composites have so many failure modes, such strange durability issues, poor inspectability of bonded joints... I'm really amazed that anyone can make a good composite airplane without millions of dollars of testing or very advanced Finite Element Models. (Probably goes to show I have been spending too much time talking with 787 people and not enough with EZ people...)

I have just posted the second post of this series of three.

The first one was the introduction to kitplanes in general. This second one is about the building of the Boeing ONE BCnF Glasair. You guys might be interested in what it looks like to build an entire airplane out of fiberglass...

http://onebcnf.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/the-story-of-the-boeing-one-bcnf-team-and-their-glasair/

The third one will show what the airplane looks like after painting, cover FAA certification and first flight, and talk about flight-testing and the upcoming trip to AirVenture.