THE GOODS : Winging It : These days, many more pilots are taking to the friendly skies in planes that <i> they’ve</i> built--not in a Piper or Cessna or Beech. Talk about your do-it-yourself projects.

In the pantheon of all-time favorite do-it-yourself projects, you might expect to see the redwood hot tub kit and maybe the hot-rod engine. But slap ping together an airplane? To many, that would be tantamount to building your own nuclear reactor.

Still, that’s exactly what thousands of people throughout the country are doing each year in their garages, on their patios and in small hangars at community airports. It’s not easy and it’s not quick, but it has become for many private fliers the alternative to a general aviation aircraft market that has run nearly dry. In recent years, as a result of massive liability insurance premiums, manufacturers such as Cessna, Piper and Beech eliminated mass production of small civilian airplanes. They are just beginning to manufacture new craft since the passage of the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, which stipulates that factory-built aircraft more than 18 years old are no longer subject to product-liability claims.

Still, buying a new, factory-built craft can be prohibitively expensive. And used planes still are too costly for many would-be owner-pilots.

So, many who dream of owning their own planes are building them. “There are about 17,000 amateur-built aircraft in the United States, and there are about twice that number under construction,” says Ben Owen, a spokesman for the Experimental Aircraft Assn. (EAA), an advocacy group based in Oshkosh, Wis. Experimental is the technical designation the Federal Aviation Administration applies to these craft.

That epoxy and composite squid-shaped lump under the blue tarp on George Krosse’s patio represents five years of on-again, off-again labor. It is the roughly finished fuselage of an experimental canard-style aircraft. Krosse, 72, a former Navy fighter pilot and retired airline pilot who says he has flown “a DC-3 to a DC-10 and everything in between,” is building the plane, called a Cozy, not from a kit but from scratch, using a set of plans provided by the designer, the Co-Z Development Corp. of Mesa, Ariz.

When finished, the Cozy will look unconventional. Powered by a small 150-horsepower Lycoming pusher engine, the plane’s horizontal stabilizer is near the nose, rather than the tail, and its vertical stabilizers--called winglets--are located at the tips of the swept wings (which hang from rafters in Krosse’s Newport Beach garage).

“The Wright brothers wanted to do it that way,” Krosse says, “and I think they had something going for them.”

He has owned a handful of factory-built planes over the years. He became intrigued with the Cozy canard design when he saw one at the yearly mass fly-in of experimental aircraft sponsored by the EAA in Oshkosh.

Membership in the EAA has afforded Krosse access to technical advice. Each of the nearly 800 chapters throughout the world has at least one technical counselor.

“You kind of learn as you go,” Krosse says. “And some people in our EAA chapter are not mechanical at all. You just need to follow the plans.”

The relatively low cost of the craft impressed Krosse. He says he bought the plans for about $500, and expects the materials--including the engine, wheels, brakes and avionics--to cost $15,000. He could sell the completed plane, he says, for “probably somewhere between $30,000 and $65,000.” Which, he says, smiling, “makes your labor worth about 15 cents an hour.”

Still, he says, that’s a lot cheaper than shelling out more than $100,000 for, say, a used Cessna 172.

“And this thing,” he says, gesturing to the Cozy’s fuselage, “is built like a tank. And there’s no way you can spin it or stall it.”

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Airplane building is enjoying a boom in popularity, says Dave Martin, editor of Irvine-based Kitplanes magazine. “There are about five times as many single-engine piston airplanes licensed with the FAA in recent years that have come from the home-built ranks as those that have come out of factories in this country. There were something like 2,000 to 2,500 new licensed experimental home-builts last year compared to something like 500 factory-builts.”

Kitplanes puts out an annual directory of home-built aircraft called “Plans and Kits.” The most recent directory lists 509 aircraft from 208 companies available for sale in kit or plan form. The most expensive planes are made from composites (combinations of materials such as epoxy, fiberglass or carbon fiber) and can cost as much as $175,000 to complete, while smaller wooden craft “can get into the air for around $5,000,” Martin says.

“Your time is, of course, worth something,” he says, “and that would reduce the monetary savings. But the big thing is that you can build an airplane that is quite different than anything the factories have turned out. Most [experimental planes] are physically smaller, with smaller cockpits, and can go faster with the same power and fuel.

“I wouldn’t say building them is an easy thing to do,” Martin says, “but thousands of people are accomplishing it and most have no engineering background or have never built a plane before.”

The EAA’s Owen says that within the 140,000-member ranks of his group are “people who don’t know how to pick up a hammer, but we also have some astronauts. We have people from airline captains to plain old private pilots.”

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Bob O’Connell has just pulled a painter’s mask off his face and stepped from underneath a tarp where he is painting a pair of metal seats when a tidy little plane with stubby wings taxis by the open door of the hangar at Chino Airport. The RV-6 metal-skinned two-seater is a finished version of the plane O’Connell is building.

This is his second kit plane (he sold his previous effort, a Dragonfly), and he has been working on it on weekends for 2 1/2 years. An electrical instrument engineer, O’Connell, 55, of Dana Point, says he has been flying for 35 years and appreciates the sense of progress and accomplishment that goes with a kit-plane project, as well as the versatility of the aircraft.

“Most of the time it’s enjoyable to come out here and get away from my job and see the progress,” he says. “And you have a really wide range of things you can do with an experimental aircraft. For instance, this one is fully aerobatic and it has a top speed with this engine of around 200 m.p.h. Also, it’ll probably cost around $50,000 to finish and it can keep up with a new Mooney, and that plane can cost you maybe $200,000.”

Kit planes are as safe as the factory-builts once they get through their flight test period, Martin says. FAA regulations mandate a period of test flying once an experimental craft is completed, usually 40 flying hours.

When an aircraft is completed, an FAA official inspects it, and if all is well awards it an experimental airworthiness certificate that allows it to be flown. The certificate carries limitations: During test flying, the plane must be flown solo and within 25 miles of its home airfield. Also, the plane cannot carry passengers or cargo for hire, or fly in areas with heavy air traffic, Owen says.

“Once you’re past that [test flying] and the airplane has an FAA airworthiness certificate, the accident rate is similar to the factory-builts, although when you get into higher-performance airplanes you sometimes tend to have more accidents,” Martin says.

A recent accident involving an experimental aircraft occurred near Santa Monica Airport early this month when a small home-built plane crashed into a garage in a residential neighborhood.

Complaints have been voiced by nearby residents about air traffic in the airport area, but Santa Monica Airport Manager Tim Walsh says no complaints had been received specifically about experimental aircraft, which he says often tend to be quieter than factory-builts.

“There have been only about 30 suits against kit designers, and all of them have been put aside except one,” Martin says. “Liability-wise, we have an excellent record.

“There has always been the problem of people testing their own airplanes, though,” he says. The majority of builders, with little or no prior experience in flying such craft, take them up for their test flights.

The accident rate during the flight-testing phase accounts for about 20% of all accidents involving experimental aircraft, which totaled about 170 last year, Owen says. Most accidents occur within the first two hours of flying.

“Most of them are just fender benders,” he says, “and they’re usually the direct result of somebody building an airplane over the course of two to four years and not spending much time actually flying.”

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Last year, the EAA began to assemble a group of about 300 volunteer “flight advisers” throughout the country, specialists in several types of experimental aircraft who act as instructors to familiarize builders with their new craft during flight testing.

The program has been successful enough, Owen says, that aircraft insurance companies that would previously not insure experimental craft during the first 10 hours of operation will now do it if the owner is checked out with a flight adviser during flight testing.

Personal liability insurance for experimental aircraft costs about as much as it would for factory-built craft.

Vicki Higginson of Huntington Beach calls factory-built aircraft “Spam cans.” Neither she nor her husband, Bob, a heavy-equipment mechanic, are licensed pilots--yet--but they know what they want in a plane. They want a canard design and now, on a big workbench in their garage, the composite and carbon fiber winglets of a Berkut kit aircraft are starting to take shape.

Higginson figures the project will take them about 3 1/2 years to complete, “but we thought that if we were going to do it we should do it now before we have kids.

“It’s like cooking,” she says. “If you can read, you can cook, and all you have to do is follow the directions.”