Wisconsin Aviation Attorneys

Home-Built Planes Form Heart Of EAA Air Show

It took Dave Garris five hours and 20 months to fly from his North Carolina home to EAA AirVenture. Klein Tools employees prepare to set up their display on Friday for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh. The annual fly-in convention starts Monday and runs through Sunday, July 31. The company sponsors aerobatic pilot Michael Mancuso, who will be appearing at the AirVenture air shows. SpaceShipOne - the first civilian spacecraft and the winner of the $10 million X Prize - is expected to land at Wittman Regional Airport at 3 p.m. Monday for AirVenture. The actual journey took only five hours Sunday, but Garris began his quest to visit the fly-in and aviation convention, which begins its weeklong run today, when he opened up a crate one year and eight months ago.Inside the Barcalounger-size box was his airplane - minus the propeller and engine. Paint and cockpit instruments were missing, too.
 
But otherwise, the plane kit delivered to Garris' home had just about everything he needed to build his own aircraft. Which is what Garris did pretty much every waking moment when he wasn't working or eating. And flying his home-built plane to AirVenture for the first time this year and parking it next to other planes built by their owners is a dream come true. "That plane is mine - I created it," said Garris, as he perspired in the heat Sunday afternoon half an hour after arriving at Oshkosh. "When you take off you think of it when it was in a crate and then you're flying 7,000 feet over Ohio." It's folks like Garris who are the descendants, in an aviation sense, of the people who started the EAA. The Experimental Aircraft Association began in the basement of Paul Poberezny's Hales Corners home more than 50 years ago when a group of people who liked to tinker and who liked to fly got together to build their own planes. Compared with the non-aviation world, the term homebuilder has a different meaning here at Oshkosh. It means building your own plane in your home, spending thousands of hours putting in rivets, stretching fabric over wings, installing an engine, attaching wings and a tail and painting it so other homebuilders here at AirVenture will stand around your handiwork and say "wow."Workshops and questions,
While the aviation convention attracts plane nuts, pilots and those who like watching the air show, it's also the place for homebuilders to attend workshops on welding or fabric construction, to buy parts and to ask questions. Paul Muhle, who flew to Oshkosh Sunday in a One Design DR 107 he built from plans instead of a kit, said he picks up tips from other homebuilders or sees something he likes on another plane - perhaps a paint scheme or a different welding process - every time he visits AirVenture.

Though many might think it's strange to build a plane and then actually fly it, thousands of feet above terra firma, homebuilders don't see anything unusual about it, said Doug Kelly, chairman of the EAA Homebuilt Aircraft Council. Homebuilders are "kind of a unique breed in a sense. Being one I can't say that we're weird, but I think people who undertake things that have the public image of riskiness have the reputation of daredevilness," said Kelly, who flies a Kit Fox Model 4 he spent six years of weekends building. "Why do folks build lots of things? Because they're interested in craftsmanship and it's unique in the sense they're building something that will fly." Plane kits abound,
Home-built planes evolved from World War II-era aviators and mechanics building their own planes from scratch in the late 1940s and '50s - to people purchasing designs of homebuilts they liked - to plane kits that include blueprints, checklists and all of the parts. There are now more than 500 companies that sell plane kits. Garris purchased a Van's Aircraft RV-9A kit for $19,000. He spent $24,000 for an engine and $30,000 for paint and cockpit instruments like navigation and radio gear. He put 3,000 hours of his own sweat into it. So for a little over $70,000, the construction company owner now has a new plane, less than half of what it would cost him to buy a similar aircraft built in a factory. He's not worried about flying in a plane he built in a crawlspace underneath his house.

"I've been flying in (factory) production aircraft and I saw how they were built and I knew I could do better. I know where all the bolts are on my plane," said Garris, who loved to fly remote-controlled planes and decided to build a plane that could carry him somewhere. Van's Aircraft - like many plane kit manufacturers, as well as companies that sell engines and propellers - has a booth at AirVenture. The Oregon company was started by a man who built his own plane then drew up plans for his friends who liked his aircraft so much they wanted to build their own. Rigorous inspections held, Over three decades the company has sold about 18,000 kits with about 5,000 flying and the rest still under construction in basements and garages, said company president Tom Green. Each home-built plane undergoes a rigorous inspection by a representative of the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure its airworthiness. The inspector who checked Garris' plane spent six hours combing every inch. The first 25 hours a home-built plane is flown, no passengers are allowed to ride along. The plane is only allowed to fly within a limited area, usually 100 nautical miles, near its home airport for those 25 hours. Once Garris had completed his 25 hours, his first passenger was his wife.Now that Garris has finally finished the project that took up almost two years of his life, he's not content. Shortly after arriving at AirVenture Sunday he spied a kit plane - an RV-9 tail dragger -that he wants to build next.

Contact an Aviation Attorney in Wisconsin to find out more about your legal rights.