Dave sent some pictures of his finished Kitfox 5 11/22/06

For some pilots, home is a hangar
By Mike Stucka from the Cherokee Ledger-News
mikes@ledgernews.com

Some people like to build Christmas toys or furniture. Others like to build airplanes.
For a group of local airplane enthusiasts, home-built airplanes are sometimes the answer to expensive, older factory-built planes.
Russ Jackson of Marietta, a 56-year-old manufacturing engineer for Lockheed Martin, was drawn back to airplanes as a hobby.
“I flew a long time ago, and quit, and just got the bug again,” he said.
Now, in about a year, he has spent some 1,200 hours building a Sonex, an all-metal plane.
David Estapa, a 52-year-old commercial general contractor, said he has spent 960 hours working in his Woodstock basement garage. His plane, a Kitfox 5, has gradually gotten heavier as he worked to install some 6,000 parts of all sizes. Estapa bought the plane on Valentine’s Day 1997 and originally planned to finish it in two years. Yellow bins in his workshop are still filled with countless bags of carefully numbered parts.
He already has a monogrammed shirt with the plane’s name and tail number, and vows that he will fly with other Kitfox pilots in Alaska next year.
Such delays are common in homebuilt aircraft, said Kerry Bedsworth of Acworth, who heads the local chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association.
“We’ve got an expression in the kit-building field,” Bedsworth said. “You’re 90-percent done with 90 percent to go.”
Still, Bedsworth said, a trade-off between time and money allows some pilots to own a plane for relatively little money. The most time-intensive kits come as nothing more than a pile of plans. The homebuilders then make their own parts, he said.
Bedsworth has just begun looking at what he’ll need to finish building an all-wood Falco that was started by a Florida man. Because the airplane’s wings are tapered, builders must make about a dozen differently-sized pairs of wing ribs. Such labor-intensive work in some homebuilding kits allows pilots to begin flying for $10,000 in a plane powered by a Volkswagen engine, he said.
By comparison, a factory-built plane may cost $140,000.
The heavy time demands lead to compromises. The 45-year-old Bedsworth said people might not be able to go to all their children’s soccer games. Estapa said his wife had to co-sign the contract to buy the plane because the manufacturer knows the kits won’t be finished without the support of a spouse.
When not working on their own planes, EAA members often visit each others’ homes to give advice and encouragement.
Once a month, they offer free flights, often from fields in Marietta or Cartersville, in the Young Eagles program. The program often serves youth from the Civil Air Patrol, ROTC or church groups interested in planes.
Estapa, who had wanted to fly since age 16 and bought the kit before getting a pilot’s license, said proposed federal rules may cut in half the cost of getting a license.
Bedsworth described the urge to fly as something that gets in your blood. Flying incorporates valuable lessons on navigation, physics, weather and math, and the Young Eagles flights have inspired some youths to get their licenses, he said.
“Where are tomorrow’s pilots going to come from? Today’s kids, right?” he said.
EAA’s Chapter 268 normally meets on the third Thursday of each month at a member’s house or at the restaurant at Marietta’s McCollum Field. Young Eagles flights are normally held on the fourth Saturday of each month.
For more information, visit http://www.eaa268.org.