foam blocks all around the engine and took
two Surform draw tools and kept pulling and
scraping until it looked like what I thought
that airplane’s nose should look like,” Chuck
said. He shaped the two-part nose bowl to
resemble a modern nacelle. “That way there
were fewer breaks in the lines,” he said. “It’s
a continuous line from the curve of the rud-
der all the way up to the spinner, which was
my goal.”
He named the airplane Rocinante, a trib-
ute to John Steinbeck’s truck camper in one
of his favorite books, Travels With Charley,
which was itself named after the horse in
Don Quixote. “Between Rocinante and Don
Quixote, Rocinante was obviously smarter—
and the one who was more likely to rescue
someone, if anyone wanted to be rescued,”
Chuck said. “That’s kind of how I think
about airplanes.”
Finally, he added the tag line: “Windmills
and Rainbows Air Tours.” Windmills, of
course, also refers to Don Quixote, or at least
the would-be hero’s errant quests. “If that
doesn’t describe me, nothing does,” Chuck
said. “Everything is always worse than it
turns out to be, and everything is always bet-
ter than it turns out to be. I’ve been doing
that all my life.”
To wit, consider the pratfalls of
building an airplane, where the fearsome
dragon on the horizon often isn’t such a
monster at all. “If you think about all the ups
and downs in construction—finishing the
center section, and having it ready for cover,
and realizing that the rear spars are a quar-
ter of an inch too close together, and having
to tear it all apart to start over—you go, I
can’t build an airplane,” he said. “Well, you
get your Skil saw, and you cut it up into little
pieces, and you build the center section. And
then it’s right.”
FULL CIRCLE
Rainbows, then, are the payoff. Two or three
years ago, he flew his Citabria at the edge of
a squall and saw a double rainbow form a
full circle around the airplane. That took his
breath away. “I know where the end of the
rainbow is,” he said. “You’re right in the mid-
dle of it, baby.”
Chuck also found himself amid a group
of builders who were nearly as eager as he to
see the Hatz completed. “I think the most
important thing is the relationships I built—
the phenomenal generosity of other builders
and aviation people that I never could have
understood before I started,” he said. It
would come in handy, especially as he
approached his first flight.
It took 11 years for Chuck’s
Hatz plans to become a
plane and take to the
sky. It’s a “stock” Classic,
with the exception of the
reshaped cowl.
