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/142883
T h e H o m e b uil d e r s o f S C A L ED C o m p o s i t e s venting the wheel," instead using six 747 engines, four 747 body landing gears, one complete 747 cockpit, and as many other bits and pieces as it makes sense to use from a pair of retired 747-400s acquired from United Airlines. And there are lots of homebuilders at SCALED! At present, the company employs just less than 500 people, of which about 140 are engineers—and more than half of those, as well as some of the shop floor fabrication people, are homebuilders. Why have they chosen to come to work at SCALED? Partly—perhaps primarily—it's to be able to work on projects as fascinating as SpaceShipTwo or Stratolaunch, but it also turns out that SCALED is a terrific place at which a homebuilder can work, period. Private hangar space on the airport, right next door to SCALED, is relatively affordable, which means that on lunch breaks or after work, it's easy to work on one's own project. Moreover, SCALED not only allows, but also actively encourages, such work—the people SCALED likes to hire (and the company is actively recruiting right now), whether fabricators or engineers, are people who like to get completely involved in a project and work with their hands. My host for my recent visit, engineer Elliot Seguin, has worked for years on Jon Sharp's amazing Nemesis racer/ kit plane project and now campaigns his own Cassutt racer, Wasabi, on the Formula 1 circuit. He's been tasked with finding and hiring new talent, so one of his reasons for allowing EAA Experimenter to get an unprecedented look behind the scenes was to spread the word to an audience that may well already harbor some potential SCALED workers. One of the ways the company encourages homebuilders, in addition to offering competitive salaries and benefits, is that it makes a wide range of capabilities available to homebuilders for their own projects. Want to use an expensive special-purpose tool, one you couldn't afford, down at your own hangar? Check it out from SCALED at the end of the day, and bring it back the next morning. Done with construction and ready to equip your new aircraft? SCALED buys and uses so many advanced avionics components that it has become a dealer for at least one dominant brand, and employees can buy anything from a comm radio to a full glass panel at cost. Ralph Wise's GT-400, a one-of, 520-hp low wing with a metal wing and a composite fuselage. It rockets at 350 mph. Ralph is a mentor to many of the SCALED builders. With capabilities like these available, some SCALED homebuilders have been able to build exceedingly impressive aircraft. For example, SCALED Vice President Cory Bird started out as a shop technician in 1982 and advanced to chief engineer for the Stratolaunch program; but from a homebuilding viewpoint, his positions at SCALED allowed him to design and build his breathtaking Symmetry airplane, N214ST, which won Grand Champion at AirVenture 2004. Brothers Matthew and Justin Stinemetze are working on the prototype for a three-quarter-scale composite Grumman Bearcat kit; they used the services of Sierra Technical Services, a small, firm right in Mojave (and one of several that have sprung up in town to support SCALED and other aerospace activity at the airport), to machine superbly accurate molds from foam material dense enough to withstand the manufacture, not just of a prototype but of a significant production run, of kit parts. These are the kinds of capabilities that would simply be unavailable to homebuilders, no matter how dedicated, anywhere else. Dustin Riggs is current caretaker of Old Blue, Dick Rutan's round-theworld Long-EZ. It's also in Phase 1 fight testing afer some modifcations. 24 Vol.2 No.7 / July 2013 Not that all the SCALED homebuilders come home from their after-work hours covered with epoxy or microballoon dust. Quite a few of them are building "tin" homebuilts—among