Experimenter - EAA's Homebuilder's Newsletter

EAA's 601 Survey Helps Make Case to FAA
I'm sure by now all of you are aware of the recent FAA actions regarding the Zenith Zodiac CH 601 XL and CH 650. These aircraft are certificated in a number of categories including experimental amateur-built. They're homebuilts! Let me share with you some thoughts regarding these homebuilt aircraft and how this situation can affect the entire homebuilt community.

CH 601 XLs and CH 650s which already held experimental airworthiness certificates, either experimental amateur-built or experimental light-sport aircraft (E-LSA), were not grounded, but owners and operators were strongly encouraged to incorporate the AMD-recommended modifications or in some similar way address the safety concerns. Read more

Paul's Pick

The concern over the design of the 601 series has highlighted the need for the homebuilding community to be involved in ensuring safe designs. Paul Poberezny wrote in the July 1973 issue of Experimenter about the potential for weakness in design of both amateur and factory-built aircraft. At that time, Mr. Poberezny wrote about EAA's efforts to work with the FAA on creating a system to identify weak aircraft designs. As EAA is doing now, Mr. Poberezny felt then EAA needed to promote self-monitoring before it was imposed by regulatory bodies. Read Paul's article

Homebuilders Update: EAA Publications
By Adam Smith, EAA Vice President, Membership

Ever since we started publishing Experimenter as a monthly e-newsletter for homebuilders, your enthusiastic editor, Pat Panzera, has been politely pestering me to write an article about the Sopwith Pup replica I’m slowly building in my hangar. Sorry, Pat, this is not that article, although I’m working on it!

But I do want to take time to share some details of what EAA is doing for homebuilders in our print and electronic publications. You may have read of some significant changes coming to EAA Sport Aviation magazine starting with next month’s issue. In fact, they are some of the most extensive changes seen in more than 56 years of EAA publishing. I value the special involvement of homebuilders in the organization and would like to share some additional details and insights with you. Read more

Savoring a New Design

The show stopper for this year's COPPERSTATE was undisputedly Chris Christiansen's one-off Savor. With its very short-span cantilevered high wing, extra-wide cabin with leather tandem seating, welded 4130 steel tube fuselage inside a fiberglass fairing with an all-metal wing and empennage filled as smooth as any composite wing - Savor appearing vaguely similar like so many tricycle-geared European S-LSA entrants, until you look in the cooling inlets and see an 0-320. It was quite the enigma to the many attendees who stopped by to take a closer look. Read more

Peregrin XS-302
Chris Christiansen’s first design

Chris Christiansen is an avid flyer with extensive time in ultralights and hang gliders. The Peregrin (no “e” after “n”) project is an attempt at a bit of notoriety, as Chris is bitten by the bug to set and break records. He feels that his best chance to make it into the record books is by way of the experimental powered flight category, specifically in class C-1.a/0 (661 pounds gross takeoff weight or less). Chris has no formal education after high school, but he’s certainly not letting that stop him. At the time of our interview, this project occupied 100 percent of Chris’s time. Read more

Spark-Ignited Heavy Fuel, Part Deux

In a press release dated February 15, 2005, Hirth-Engines announced they were launching a 45 kW (60 hp) twin-cylinder, two-stroke engine, capable of burning heavy fuels (JP-5, JP-8) to meet the 2010 NATO and U.S. military requirements to eliminate gasoline from the battlefield for safety and logistic reasons. A key enabler that Hirth chose to meet this requirement was to become a licensee of Orbital's Air Assisted Direct Fuel Injection and incorporate this technology into these new engines. Read more

What Our Members Are Building
A One-of-a-Kind Homebuilt Fills LSA Gap

The sport pilot and light-sport aircraft (LSA) rules came with the promise of new, affordable aircraft and less-expensive training. On the surface it may appear that it has missed the mark with the average cost of a new LSA being well more than $100,000 and with rental costs being the best part of $100 per hour. So rather than throwing up our collective hands, what if we take a step back? Perhaps by just broadening our field we'll see something that's been around since the beginning of homebuilding, and it's certainly a cornerstone of EAA's foundation: experimental amateur-built aircraft that meet the light-sport aircraft definition. Read more

How to...
Prop Balancer Revisited

John Steere’s beautiful BD-4 appeared in a recent issue of Experimenter. John has enjoyed hundreds of hours flying his supercharged Ford (T-Bird) V6 powered experimental aircraft, including multiple trips to Oshkosh. As an avid reader of CONTACT! Magazine, he read the article on propeller balancing we first published in CONTACT! and again in last month's Experimenter - and took it to the next level. He is sharing that info with us. Read more

Scaled Composites is Hiring!
EAA was contacted by the folks at Scaled Composites, builder of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, that the company is in urgent need of people with skills that are likely to exist in the EAA/homebuilder community. Read more

From the EAA Homebuilding Community

The Homebuilders Corner message forum at Oshkosh365 is as active as ever. Have a look at the list below and follow the links to read the actual questions and discussion topics.

Can You Help?

Interesting Discussions

From the Editor
Patrick Panzera, EAA 555743
ppanzera@eaa.org

Pat Panzera As this year comes to a close, we celebrate the ending of the first year of publishing this newsletter. It's been quite a learning experience for everyone involved, especially me. Although I've been publishing Contact! Magazine for the best part of this decade, doing so is nowhere near as structured and regimented as what the EAA staff goes through to put out any of their publications, electronic or print. And now that I'm part of this system, I had to learn to adjust to these challenging demands - steep curve for me for sure!

The success of Experimenter has surpassed every expectation, especially with respect to the number of subscribers. This attests to the fact that EAA members want detailed homebuilding info! So with that, I need to ask for something from you in return. I want your stories. I need your stories. Your fellow EAA members want and need your stories published here in Experimenter.

So please, make a New Year's resolution to write something for Experimenter in 2010. Virtually every story you've read in Experimenter that I didn't personally write took prodding on my part to convince the author that his story was worth reading. Most people seem to think that they don't have anything to offer, but the success of this newsletter says differently. The most successful stories took the most prodding and convincing, and you see the results.

If you have built or are currently building an experimental, we want to know about it. (Adam Smith!) If you have tips and ideas that you can pass along, please do so. If you need technical assistance like getting your hand-scrawled illustrations turned into computer-aided design or cleaner work, we can handle that for you. Even if you don't have digital photos, we can certainly work with hard copies. Just let me know what you would like to submit and I'll do all I can to make it really easy for you, even if you just want to tell your story over the phone and have us type it.

I pray that you and yours have a joyous holiday season and that next year brings you prosperity, good health, close family ties, and plenty of time and opportunities to learn, build, and fly.