Boom in Home-Built Craft : Kit Planes: Amateur Pilots’ Dream Ships

Lots of folks couldn’t believe their eyes when Larry Lam’s sleek airplane suddenly appeared in the driveway in front of his Palos Verdes home.

After 11 years, the retired aeronautical engineer was ready to see if the plane he had designed and built inside his garage would fly. Like thousands of others in a growing national movement, Lam had built the plane with his own hands, and he was ready to realize a pilot’s dream of flying his own creation.

But it had been a long, long 11 years.

“My family was really glad to see it go,” Lam said.

And when it rolled out of his garage, his neighbors stood in awe.

“We collected a crowd in a hurry,” said Buck Buchanan, a pilot who had agreed to test fly Lam’s plane, called the Wanderer.

Brief Test Flight

The plane was hauled aboard a trailer and carted to an airport at Chino, and a few hours later it soared briefly on a six-minute test flight, proving that it was of sound aeronautical design, although slightly underpowered.

Lam was near tears when he joyfully showed a videotape of that first flight to other pilots at the monthly meeting of the Torrance chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Assn. He is shopping now for a more powerful engine, and he expects soon to realize the full rewards of spending 11 years inside his garage.

Would he do it again?

“Of course,” he said. “Now my son wants one.”

Lam’s story is no isolated case. Most of the small, private aircraft built in the United States this year will emerge from garages in suburban residential neighborhoods, not from the assembly lines of the nation’s airplane manufacturers.

The trend has been spurred partly by economics. The price of commercially manufactured single-engine planes has soared out of the reach of most private pilots, plunging demand to the point that many companies have at least temporarily suspended building single-engine planes.

Out of the Business

Cessna Aircraft Co. of Wichita, Kan., which built the ubiquitous Cessnas that blanket general aviation airports across the land, “got out of the single engine plane business” on June 1, according to company spokesman Dean Humphrey. The firm has indicated that it may resume manufacturing sometime after 1987, but that is open to question.

“In the late 1970s, we were selling nearly 9,000 a year,” Humphrey said. That number plunged to 640 last year.

The commercial manufacturers have blamed their woes largely on the high cost of product liability insurance, which they claim has doubled the price of their planes.

Cessna’s smallest plane, the two-passenger Cessna 152, sold for around $40,000 with basic avionics gear in 1985, the last year it was manufactured. Although some small planes are still being built commercially, the cost usually runs substantially more than $100,000, and some sell for as high as $350,000.

That, in turn, has added to a boom that was already under way among the craftsmen who have turned to their talents more than to their pocketbooks.

“You can build your own airplane, a nice plane, for between $5,000 and $10,000,” said John Burton of the Experimental Aircraft Assn. of Oshkosh, Wis.

But it is so time consuming that only a small percentage of those who start actually finish, according to amateur aircraft builders. And the successful ones all seem to have one thing in common: They enjoy building as much as they enjoy flying.

“You can’t do it just because you want the airplane,” said Ron Schroeder of Torrance. “You will never get through it.”

Schroeder is building a Long-EZ designed by Burt Rutan, the innovative designer who created the Voyager aircraft that two pilots hope to fly around the world without stopping and without refueling. The Long-EZ is one of the most challenging of the home-builts, but those who complete the task end up with a plane that will cruise at 180 m.p.h. while burning less gas than a compact automobile.

Airborne Sports Cars

That high performance is one of the reasons that more and more pilots are turning to home-builts. These small, extremely maneuverable planes are like airborne sport cars. The price one pays for that performance is in the payload. Many of them are single seaters, and few carry more than two persons with about 35 pounds of baggage.

In recent years the Federal Aviation Administration has streamlined its certification process, making it far easier for amateurs to get an “airworthiness certificate” that allows them to fly their home-built airplanes. Prior to 1983, the FAA conducted “progressive inspections” at various stages during construction, but now the agency inspects only the final product.

“We won’t look at it until it’s done,” said H. E. (Bud) Martell, manager of the FAA’s manufacturing inspection district office in Van Nuys.

When it does finally inspect the plane, the FAA looks only at the quality of workmanship, not the design, Martell said.

“If he’s got something that doesn’t look like a wing, and he wants to try it, we’ll let him,” he said.

The FAA’s regulations were designed to protect people on the ground, not the people who build their own airplanes, according to pilots interviewed for this story.

Freedom to Try

Martell added that the FAA does not “try to suppress” amateur builders.

“Our attitude is ‘if you think that is good, try it,’ ” he said. “That’s the only way this aviation business is going to grow.”

If the FAA inspector is satisfied with the quality of workmanship, he will issue a “special airworthiness certificate” that allows the plane to fly, but restricts it to a sparsely populated area for at least the first 25 hours. The pilot is allowed to pick a rural airfield for the test flights.

Upon completion of the required time, the pilot signs a form certifying that the requirement has been met, and the restriction is lifted. Although the pilot is not allowed to “hire out” the aircraft, it can be operated like a commercially built plane.

Since the person who flies it also built it, the pilot is licensed by the FAA to perform all maintenance, representing a considerable savings since production line airplanes must undergo annual servicing by licensed mechanics who charge about $50 an hour.

The number of amateur-built aircraft registered with the FAA totaled 16,204 as of Dec. 31, 1985, an increase of about 9% in only two years. Last year, 117 amateur-built planes were registered in the area covered by the Van Nuys FAA office, which extends north from the San Fernando Valley to the Oregon border.

Number Growing

That number is expected to grow tremendously this year in the wake of an amateur building craze that may be without precedent in the history of aviation.

The growth is so great that the largest manufacturer of single engine airplanes in the world today--although he is not technically classified as a manufacturer--is a Santa Paula artist who began selling airplane kits a little more than a year ago.

Lance Neibauer moved out of his design studio in Hermosa Beach in 1982 and into a small shop in Gardena, where he began building his first “Lancair.” Late that year, he flew the sleek little two-place plane for the first time, and spent the next two years improving it.

Early last year, he decided that he was ready to begin selling kits, a timing which proved most fortuitous in view of the fact that the major airplane manufacturers were just about to decide to abandon the field. He announced his intention in an article in April, 1985, in Sport Aviation, the official publication of the Experimental Aircraft Assn.

“We sold 40 kits in the first three weeks,” Neibauer said in an interview in his hangar on the edge of the Santa Paula airport.

He said he has already sold 175 kits, of which 115 have been delivered.

This has been accomplished even though the kits have been in production for such a brief time that no one has completed one yet.

He has customers in six nations on three continents, and the phone rang constantly during the interview as people called to place orders or to inquire about the plane. With the major manufacturers at least temporarily out of the market, Neibauer has the hottest show in town, although there are many other kit manufacturers around.

Since he sells only kits, Neibauer is not licensed by the FAA to build airplanes, and he is thus not subject to inspections and quality control restrictions that apply to licensed manufacturers.

To qualify as an amateur-built aircraft, the owner must have built at least 51% of the plane, a requirement that FAA officials admit they cannot enforce. It takes about 1,000 hours to assemble a kit such as the Lancair, although all the major structural components are supplied in the kit, and Neibauer has a letter from the FAA stating that buyers can be licensed if they assemble the kit.

Neibauer admits the FAA is being lenient in its interpretation of the “51% rule,” but he says it is essential if general aviation is going to survive.

“The entry level has dried up with production aircraft,” he said.

For many pilots, he and others said, building their own planes may be the only way to fly.

They are aided in that effort by the availability of a wide range of sophisticated materials that have led to a new generation of sleek, high performance planes. Most kits consist primarily of premolded fiberglass parts that are either joined to form the main structure, as with the Lancair, or fitted over a homemade wooden skeleton, as with the popular KR2, manufactured by Rand Robinson Engineering of Huntington Beach.

The KR2 was designed by Ken Rand and Stuart Robinson while both were working as flight test engineers at McDonnell Douglas.

“We think there are well over 1,000 KRs flying,” said Jeanette Rand, president of Rand Robinson.

Costs About $4,000

The KR is at the lower end of the market in terms of price. The kit sells for about $4,000, but that does not include the motor or instruments. The plane is powered by a Volkswagen engine, which has been re-engineered for aeronautical use.

Equipped with the barest instruments, she said, the completed plane runs around $10,000, considerably less than half the cost of a Lancair. Full instrumentation, however, can push the cost much higher.

Amateur builders claim that anyone with reasonable skills and a few ordinary tools can build their own plane from a kit.

“It’s about the same complexity of a model airplane kit,” said Kevin Kelley, an architect who now works at Rand Robinson, “except you tend to pay more attention to the plans.”

The degree of the difficulty depends largely on the type of aircraft. There are fewer and fewer pioneers such as Larry Lam these days, because most builders shy away from designing their own plane and go with a kit instead.

Amateur builders generally get high marks for safety, although crash statistics for home-built planes are not readily available.

‘They’re Pretty Sincere’

“Most of the people who build are going to fly in it,” said the FAA’s Martell. “They’re pretty sincere.”

He said he has seen no evidence that home-built planes are inherently unsafe, and several amateur builders noted that their liability insurance is about the same for their homemade planes as it is for similar production aircraft, indicating that the insurance industry has no problem with safety.

The FAA does not require any safety equipment aboard home-builts that is not required for production aircraft. The requirements are based on the use of the aircraft. For example, certain instruments are required in order to fly in controlled air spaces, and the same requirements apply to production as well as home-built aircraft. Although the FAA seems satisfied with the home-builts’ safety record, some amateur builders have paid a high price.

Ken Rand, who designed the KR2, flew one of his little planes all the way to Florida in 1979, stopping at air shows along the way. He was almost home when he ran into a fierce snowstorm over the San Gabriel Mountains.

He was descending through the storm when his engine failed, his wife, Jeanette, recalled. Rand, a veteran test pilot, was killed in the crash.

‘I’m Going to Hit’

According to news accounts at the time, his last words were: “I’m going to hit.”

Hundreds of others, however, have picked up where Rand left off, and a few of his planes can be found at nearly any air show.

What all the builders seem to have in common is a desire to create something really special.

“You have to have a love of flying and a love of building,” said Kelley of Rand Robinson.

“I can’t ever remember not wanting to build my own plane,” said Schroeder, who is president of the Torrance chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Assn.

Those who have done it say that there is little in life that rivals the sensation of soaring above the Earth in their own creation.

“I was too busy (on) my first flight to get very emotional,” said Neibauer, describing the maiden journey of the Lancair. “The second flight, after you’re sure the engine isn’t going to fly off, you can relax. Then it really sinks in.

“I still get that feeling, looking out the window at the wings I made, and the ground so far below. It’s pretty special.”