EAA Sport Aviation - April 2012

slightly resembles an airplane part in sight. All of
those parts are hiding within the stack of material
and the several dozen sheets of plans.

When looking at that pile of material, it may or may not dawn on you that it will be a long time before you have anything that is even vaguely air-plane-like. If you went the kit route with the same airplane, it would take you longer to uncrate it and inventory the parts than it would to temporarily put the fuselage up on the gear, install the seats, and be sitting in it with your wife and kids while setting off on an imaginary trip to grandma’s house. By the way, if you don’t want the neighbors to think you’re nuts, don’t do that in the driveway.

We can even make an old warbird smile.

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EAA Sport Aviation, 1/3 page “square” Sensenich Propellers Agency: Tim Kern INK

863-651-6095; info@timkern.com
Fixed-pitch
Wood and Metal
Propellers

PLAN VIEW

At one time, prior to about the mid-1970s, most of the homebuilts at fly-ins, including Rockford and then Oshkosh, were plansbuilt, and no one thought anything of it. The fact that so many builders went the plansbuilt route in the past absolutely proves that lots of folks can muster up the commitment and learn the skills. But that was then and this is now. Where there were a few thousand homebuilts flying before kits came into being, today there are tens of thousands of kit planes flying, including more than 7,600 RVs alone. The effect of the quick-build kits on the homebuilt population and the industry that supports the sport aviation movement can’t be overestimated.

Of all the factors that separate kitbuilders from plansbuilders, an obsessive form of “ project orientation” is probably the most critical. Project orientation is the ability to mentally divide the project into smaller units and judge progress based only on those smaller units rather than the whole project. A plansbuilt airplane will never be completed without carrying that mindset (which, to a lesser extent, applies to kitbuilders as well) to the extreme because the builder spends an obscene amount of time fabricating what amounts to minutiae: tiny parts, fittings, tabs, etc. The successful plansbuilder sees each of those tiny items as “the project.” He loses sight of the airplane as a whole and derives a massive amount of satisfaction from taking a piece of flat steel and making a couple dozen tabs for mounting widgets to the fuselage. When he’s finished with that project, he moves on to making bell cranks, then the fuselage