Experimenter

JAN 2013

Experimenter is a magazine created by EAA for people who build airplanes. We will report on amateur-built aircraft as well as ultralights and other light aircraft.

Issue link: http://experimenter.epubxp.com/i/101874

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T h e S e c o n d T im e A r o un d… Andy and Sam's Lancair Legacy was named kit-built grand champion at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2012. watched what he did in his job, and from the beginning, I knew I liked tech stuff and airplanes." After earning a degree in electrical engineering, Andy wound up as a biomedical engineer at the University of California (UC), Davis. "I retired recently, but for many years I worked as a firmware (software) developer and integration/test engineer on radar warning systems for Navy and Air Force tactical aircraft," Andy explained. "We did a lot of flight testing on the F/A-18, for example. The great part was doing software that tied together all the hardware—radar receivers, computers, displays, interfaces, and so on—on some really fantastic jet aircraft." That certainly sounds like a logical transition into homebuilding airplanes, doesn't it? Not! Part of the time, when talking to Andy, it's hard to keep from feeling as if you're talking to someone whose level of technical understanding extends far over the horizon from the rest of us. Then he'll say something that brings him back to Earth in a very low tech sort of way. He continued, "I started flying while I was at UC Davis, but I had started sky diving several years before that. For a long, long time I had a lot more takeoffs than I did landings: My jumps outnumbered my flying hours by quite a bit. "I found learning to fly to be exciting even though we were flying C-150s and 172s. In fact, with only 85 hours, I took a 172 on a cross-country from California to Chicago and back. Then I bought a 182, which was a lot faster, and it 14 Vol.2 No.1 / January 2013 got me places quicker. But something was missing. By the time I began to understand what was missing, I got too busy with life and quit flying for 18 years." Sounds familiar, doesn't it? "I love building stuff. Almost anything: houses, furniture, you name it," he said. "So, during the period that I wasn't flying, I gave some thought to building an airplane. The first step in that direction came in 2002, when I went to Oshkosh for the first time, not knowing exactly what I'd find. One thing I found was that the event rekindled the urge to get back into flying. But there wasn't much challenge to it, and the thoughts of building an airplane kept nagging at me. So I started reading dad's engineering books and looking at composite construction, à la Burt Rutan. "I found a lot of the information in the books to be fascinating. I especially liked understanding the way things were fabricated and found the technology of the 1950s and '60s to be incredible. The upshot of all of this was that the building bug bit me hard, and in 2004 I bought a Lancair Legacy kit, the fixed-gear version. At the time it seemed like a huge but doable challenge. Of course, it helped that ReidHillview airport, where I was building, had lots of Lancairs based on it, so there was a lot of applicable knowledge floating around." It would be easy to say that this is the beginning of the end of his story—that he got his airplane, worked on his airplane, and finished it. Then he took it to Oshkosh and other fly-ins. But that's not the story because this was only his first Legacy kit. And this is where it gets interesting.

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