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/118927
G e or g e R i c h a r d s , H i s K i w i Fa l c o… fanatics milling around it means he has pegged the determination meter. It's at that point that you have to give the man even more respect knowing that he's tackled, and whipped, a ton of impossible obstacles. To answer the first question most people ask about George and his Falco: No, he didn't fly it to Oshkosh, a distance of 8,312 miles, most of it over water. He said, "I fly A320s for a living, and I think even a 320 would be too small to take to America from home, much less the Falco. I shipped it, and I like to think of the disassembly/reassembly process as something of a homebuilder's approach to transporting an aircraft. We use our imagination and ability to solve problems, so I modified a few things on the Falco to make it be a quicker assembly/ disassembly process, and despite the shipping company hassles I had, I really enjoyed the rest of the assembly/ disassembly process and the people whom I met along the way as a result of it. "Just so you know, the fuselage comes apart just behind the cockpit section. So, I removed the engine and the rear fuselage half and stood the wing and main fuselage on the firewall on a dolly I constructed. Then the rear fuselage and fully assembled tail and the engine went on a second dolly. This all fit into a 40-foot, on-deck shipping container. But it just barely fit: There was only 5 millimeters to spare at the top of the door." George didn't build the Falco with the idea of bringing it to Oshkosh. In fact, the reason he built the Falco was…well… because he wanted to build it. He said, "I started flying in 1979, mostly because it was something I'd wanted to do since I got my first ride in an airplane as a 4-year-old, when visiting England. I didn't actually learn about homebuilt airplanes until much later, in 1992, after I'd already started flying for the airlines. I was waiting for my wife and went into a bookstore to pass the time. I started thumbing through a copy of Kitplanes magazine. I've always liked doing things with my hands, and building an airplane seemed like a good thing to do. There was a photo of a Falco, and I really liked the way it looked; so just like that, without doing any research, I decided to build one." What little research George did do revealed that there were plans for the airplane available, as were many kit components. However, he decided to go the plans-only route. "I had no experience building anything like an airplane," he said, "but no one told me I couldn't do it. So I started ordering materials and started making sawdust. Very quickly I realized that each individual part became the project. While I had started building it because I wanted to fly it, that feeling was quickly replaced by an urge to make each piece as nearly perfect as I could do. I knew the piece was part of my airplane, but I didn't look at it that way. I was just build- George's Falco on the fightline at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2012. He shipped the aircraf in a crate to California where he put it back together and few to Oshkosh. Flying from New Zealand was too big of a challenge, George said. 12 Vol.2 No.4 / April 2013