I f I C a n D o T hi s
Hal Bryan works with a cleco. Hal is EAA's Online Community Manager.
We're Building an Airplane!
And if we can, you can, too
By Hal Bryan
"We're building an airplane."
been lucky enough to fly a pretty large and diverse
number of aircraft.
It feels really good just to say that.
But that's enough about how great I am.
"Big deal," I'm sure many of you are saying. If you're
reading this, there's a good chance that you've built one
or several airplanes yourself. In fact, I can all but guarantee that anybody reading this has more experience
building airplanes than I do.
Now, when it comes to aviation, I'm not usually the
dumbest guy in the room. I'm a second-generation
pilot and I've been flying my entire life. I first took the
controls of an airplane when I was four and spent ten
years of my childhood living on a private airstrip. I'm
a student of aviation history, and while nobody would
accuse me of being an especially high-time pilot, I've
My generation saw the dawn of the personal computer
age, so I spent a lot more of my childhood tinkering with
virtual tools than I did with the real thing. Growing up, if
there was real, hands-on work to be done on the family
airplane, there was a great possibility that after a few
minutes of looking over someone's shoulder, I'd see that
my time might be better spent fixing my dad's computer.
That's not necessarily a bad thing; I like to think that he
appreciates my technical skill set as much as I do his
knowledge of important things like wrenches and engines, not to mention the fact that my childhood geekdom
led me into an unorthodox and very satisfying series of
EAA Experimenter
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