So why do I want to build a plane?
That’s the question my wife Tina asked me once I had told her there was a new item on top of my bucket list, and is a question I asked myself lots of times before I finally placed the order for my first kit from Vans Aircraft back in May of this year, and its a very valid question – planes are not cheap, even if they come in kit form, and beyond the financial commitment there are quite a few other considerations and concerns. The big one being could I even build an aircraft? After all, despite laying claim to having basic self-taught DIY skills (Tina might say otherwise), and some mechanical knowledge from owning a 1966 MGB (fixing things on a regular basis go hand in hand in owning an old British car) I haven’t worked with metal or rivets of any kind since I was at school in the 80’s and Depeche Mode were cool (they still are).
So what got me thinking about building? Well I started looking seriously about buying a plane or potentially getting into a small syndicate about a year go, mainly just for the flexibility of being able to go flying where I want and when I want. The club I fly at is great, but you can very rarely rock up on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning and grab a plane for the weekend. You normally have to book a week or two in advance, or sometimes more in the summer, and there is nearly always somebody who has the plane booked after you, adding to the pressure of getting back at a particular time. Sometimes this makes the whole rental experience feel a little rushed. Its perfect if you just want to go and fly for an hour or two on an occasional basis, but I really want to use the plane to visit and explore new places in my own time. Now the problem with buying a plane that meets my budget requirements (as cheap as possible!) means the options get limited very quickly to old Cessna’s and training aircraft that herald back to the 60s or 70’s. Most have time or hours expired engines running on-condition and steam gauges and equipment that go back even further in time. Whilst perfectly airworthy you just never now if you are likely to have a big bill around the corner.
That’s what made me start looking at different options and when I discovered this whole new world of amateur built aircraft – My original perception, and yours also if you are new to the aviation world, was one of weird looking flying machines being held together with double-sided tape and balls of string and designed and built by eccentric professors in their garden sheds. The reality however couldn’t be further from the truth and many of the kit aircraft options are far more advanced aircraft than most that fill our skies today, with options for advanced avionics glass panels, autopilot, and performance numbers that look perfectly at home in the General Aviation world of certified aircraft.
So the prospect of getting a new plane, with a new engine, and state of the art avionics packages at a similar price point to a 50 year old 172 made up my mind I would build a plane. The next question was which plane to build!!
Deciding which plane to build wasn’t an easy choice, as there are just so many options out there so I decided to write down all the things I wanted and thought I needed from a plane, and used that to filter down my long list to a (very) shortlist of 2. What were my main selection criteria? Well, whilst most of my flying has been done in a 4 seater (Cessna 172) I have probably flown less than 10 times with more than 1 passenger, so a 2 seater makes sense (and helps reduce the cost considerably). My thinking was that for the rare occasion in the future that I need 4 seats I would just do what I always have done previously – and rent a plane. But for the other 99% of my flying 2 seats are more than sufficient. Other factors considered : Did I want an aerobatic capable plane – Nope, just a VFR cruiser to fly 2 or 3 hours at a time and to be capable of longer cross country flights . Did I want IFR capability – No, but it would be nice if possible to have avionics potentially IFR capable so I could us it for training purposes in the future. I also wanted something that was relatively easy to build given my total inexperience in this area. And finally I needed to like the look of it!
So Google was put to work (not much else to do during the NZ Covid lockdown anyway) and I eventually found 2 aircraft I was really interested in – The Vans RV12is, and the Sling2.
From a pure aesthetics viewpoint I preferred the Sling2 – available from the Sling factory in South Africa as a complete kit and it looked on paper to be really well spec’d.
https://www.slingaircraft.com/aircraft/sling-2/
The Van RV12-is on the other hand is out of the US and from a company (Vans Aircraft) that the more I read about, the more I liked. They have a great heritage in designing kit built aircraft and a reputation for producing quality precision kits. The RV12is really stood out as ticking all of my boxes and wish list – It is a 2 seater in the LSA category, in the US at least. In NZ from what I can tell from the rules, as I am building it myself it will be classified as an amateur built aircraft and a Microlight Class2. It also has an IFR avionics option (for training purposes, not for actual IFR flight), and is mostly assembled using blind rivets opposed to solid rivets, which significantly cuts down the build time.
So with a shortlist of 2 potential planes I dug deeper into the web, reading builder blogs, scouring forums, and watching countless you-tube videos, -until I was even more confused about which plane to opt for than when I started!. I did however find that a High School located in the Coromandel had built a couple of RV12s in recent years in conjunction with the local flying club in Whitianga NZ (Mercury Bay Flying Club), and the flying club used one as their primary aircraft.
Given Whitianga is only a scenic 2.5 hour drive away, the day after the NZ Covid 19 lockdown restrictions were eased I headed off for a trial flight with the Instructor, who also happened to be the builder of his own RV12 to see if flying in an RV12 would help me decide. I think my mind was made up after about 5minutes. They say there is a thing called the RV Grin – I now totally understand and can confirm this is real. By the end of my flight in ZK-MBA followed by looking at the instructors completed 12, and seeing another in the midst of being completed I was sold – I was going to build an RV12!
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