A little bit about myself...
I'm in my early 40's, married, no kids, currently living in Garden City, TX. I grew up not far from here in San Angelo, spent a few years in Dallas before settling down back in San Angelo for a few more years, and eventually wound up out here in the desert chasing oil money. I finally put my chemistry degree and high pressure air compressor experience to good use, and I'm the lead engineer for National Gas Services Group, Inc in Midland, designing large natural gas compressors.
I got my PPL back in '98 while I was living in Dallas, at TRL airport just east of the metroplex. It was a bit of a drive for me to take lessons, but I chose that location intentionally. It was a small airport with low rates, cheap fuel, several instructors to choose from, and they had the perfect opportunities available for basic and advanced training - anywhere east is Podunk America with empty airspace and millions of emergency landing strips between every field, and 10 minutes west you have some of the busiest Class B airspace in the US, with opportunity to mix it up with the best, biggest, and fastest that fly the friendly skies. I got the best of both worlds, and became thoroughly comfortable flying in the high-pressure world of Class B operations.
Life was pretty good back then when I was in Dallas - had a good job, great apartment, lots of friends, no wife, good paycheck, party all the time! Alas, the world does not continue to turn your way very long. I moved back to San Angelo with the same company, got married, got a house, and within 18 months I found myself broke, divorced, and jobless. Ah, well - what's that they say about building character? I piddled around for a bit, did some contracting jobs, went back to school and finished my degree, met another gal, got married again, and within a couple months found myself with my first (moderately terrific) oil-related job in Midland, working with specialized coatings in oilfield pipe. All that time since I had gotten my PPL I never lost the thrill of flying, and everytime I picked up a copy of Trade-A-Plane or Aerotrader I started thinking about knocking off banks and mugging little old ladies to raise money for my toy. A good friend of mine owns a jet aircraft service company in the Dallas area, and one of his pilots commutes in from near Houston every day in a homebuilt Lancair. He got me interested in home-builts for serious for the first time. I'd looked at stuff like the Kitfox many years ago, had a serious but brief love affair with the Berkut (like an overpowered EZ) a few years after that, but never really considered myself capable of working with the tooling and materials necessary to build an airplane - especially a composite one.
Around about 2003 I started looking at homebuilts again - initially the Lancairs like my friend was flying, and eventually branching out. I started reading forums and talking to pilots and other builders, and one name kept getting mentioned with awe - Dick VanGrunsven. In the circles I was running in, this guy seemed to come in a close second to Burt Rutan, and that was some pretty serious territory to be running in. That September I went with my jet aircraft service company friends to the Reno air races, and there was a RV6 parked down near the sport class hangars on the west end of Stead field. The pilot (who finally came out to see me, probably thinking I was about to try to steal his avionics from the way I was ogling his airplane) got trapped into about an hour and a half discussion with me about his airplane, what was required to build one, construction methods, options, costs, time required, all the good stuff. He even went so far as to pull out a laptop and burned a CD for me with his entire build log.
I was still a little worried that I didn't have "what it took" to be able to do the kind of craftsmanship that I saw on his bird - and the size of the entire task was more than a little daunting. But try as I might, I couldn't shake the idea. At that time there were about 4000 Van's aircraft flying, and I figured that there were probably 10 times that many kits in construction, and not ALL of those people were born geniuses with mad A&P skills - some of them just HAD to be normal people, right? So I started talking to a couple other builders. I cruised websites and read build logs. I looked at tool selections, work space, read all the horror stories and squeals of joy concerning different aspects of the kit, and finally sat down and started developing a financial plan of how to get where I thought I needed to be to make this happen. It actually was not too terribly bad, I have a small high pressure air services company on the side, and the mild income coming from that business would be just enough to support my airplane habit with only a few lifestyle modifications. I built up some cash, paid off some debt, and continued to tease myself online looking at kit logs and pictures of first flights. Finally, summer of 2007, I got the Big Promotion that threatened to bump me into the next tax bracket, and removed the last of my really good excuses. I mentally grabbed a gear, popped the clutch, and started on the road less travelled. I began organizing and cleaning my garage, collecting tools that I knew I would need, both new and used, and looking seriously at which model I wanted.
By this time Van had given in to popular pressure and gotten slightly away from his original focus of intense performance with no compromises, and had introduced the 9/9A and the 10, both of which are non-aerobatic and designed moreso for comfortable fun travel. The 9 is essentially a 7 with a slimmer wing for high altitude cruising, and lighter weight by slimming down the structure a bit and in the process giving up the +6G capability. The 10, of course, is his only 4 seat family wagon, albeit still with quite a lot of performance. I looked at my main mission, my typical kind of flying, and realized that since I had gotten my PPL 95+% of my trips had been (and likely would continue to be) solo or one passenger, long distance (200+nm) and occasionally business related - which meant IFR capability. The tandem seating concept never thrilled me, so it would have to be a side-by-side, which left me with the 7, 9, or 10. The 10 was more airplane than I needed since we don't have kids. The 7 and 9 are very close in performance, with the 9 having a slight efficiency edge in long XC flight due to its new wing and lighter weight. The 7 is aerobatic, the 9 is not. I like aerobatics - I think they're fun and moderately cool - but to do them safely you must do them often, and I know myself well enough to know that I would not do them often enough to be really proficient and that makes me an accident statistic waiting to happen, so I decided to remove the temptation and go with the 9. Or actually the 9A, which is the nose-gear version - I never really liked the way taildraggers handled on the ground.
So that's it in a nutshell - life hands you lemons and you make lemonade, or bitch about the lemons. Your choice. I chose to toss the lemons out the window and chase my dreams. See ya at the airport!
I got my PPL back in '98 while I was living in Dallas, at TRL airport just east of the metroplex. It was a bit of a drive for me to take lessons, but I chose that location intentionally. It was a small airport with low rates, cheap fuel, several instructors to choose from, and they had the perfect opportunities available for basic and advanced training - anywhere east is Podunk America with empty airspace and millions of emergency landing strips between every field, and 10 minutes west you have some of the busiest Class B airspace in the US, with opportunity to mix it up with the best, biggest, and fastest that fly the friendly skies. I got the best of both worlds, and became thoroughly comfortable flying in the high-pressure world of Class B operations.
Life was pretty good back then when I was in Dallas - had a good job, great apartment, lots of friends, no wife, good paycheck, party all the time! Alas, the world does not continue to turn your way very long. I moved back to San Angelo with the same company, got married, got a house, and within 18 months I found myself broke, divorced, and jobless. Ah, well - what's that they say about building character? I piddled around for a bit, did some contracting jobs, went back to school and finished my degree, met another gal, got married again, and within a couple months found myself with my first (moderately terrific) oil-related job in Midland, working with specialized coatings in oilfield pipe. All that time since I had gotten my PPL I never lost the thrill of flying, and everytime I picked up a copy of Trade-A-Plane or Aerotrader I started thinking about knocking off banks and mugging little old ladies to raise money for my toy. A good friend of mine owns a jet aircraft service company in the Dallas area, and one of his pilots commutes in from near Houston every day in a homebuilt Lancair. He got me interested in home-builts for serious for the first time. I'd looked at stuff like the Kitfox many years ago, had a serious but brief love affair with the Berkut (like an overpowered EZ) a few years after that, but never really considered myself capable of working with the tooling and materials necessary to build an airplane - especially a composite one.
Around about 2003 I started looking at homebuilts again - initially the Lancairs like my friend was flying, and eventually branching out. I started reading forums and talking to pilots and other builders, and one name kept getting mentioned with awe - Dick VanGrunsven. In the circles I was running in, this guy seemed to come in a close second to Burt Rutan, and that was some pretty serious territory to be running in. That September I went with my jet aircraft service company friends to the Reno air races, and there was a RV6 parked down near the sport class hangars on the west end of Stead field. The pilot (who finally came out to see me, probably thinking I was about to try to steal his avionics from the way I was ogling his airplane) got trapped into about an hour and a half discussion with me about his airplane, what was required to build one, construction methods, options, costs, time required, all the good stuff. He even went so far as to pull out a laptop and burned a CD for me with his entire build log.
I was still a little worried that I didn't have "what it took" to be able to do the kind of craftsmanship that I saw on his bird - and the size of the entire task was more than a little daunting. But try as I might, I couldn't shake the idea. At that time there were about 4000 Van's aircraft flying, and I figured that there were probably 10 times that many kits in construction, and not ALL of those people were born geniuses with mad A&P skills - some of them just HAD to be normal people, right? So I started talking to a couple other builders. I cruised websites and read build logs. I looked at tool selections, work space, read all the horror stories and squeals of joy concerning different aspects of the kit, and finally sat down and started developing a financial plan of how to get where I thought I needed to be to make this happen. It actually was not too terribly bad, I have a small high pressure air services company on the side, and the mild income coming from that business would be just enough to support my airplane habit with only a few lifestyle modifications. I built up some cash, paid off some debt, and continued to tease myself online looking at kit logs and pictures of first flights. Finally, summer of 2007, I got the Big Promotion that threatened to bump me into the next tax bracket, and removed the last of my really good excuses. I mentally grabbed a gear, popped the clutch, and started on the road less travelled. I began organizing and cleaning my garage, collecting tools that I knew I would need, both new and used, and looking seriously at which model I wanted.
By this time Van had given in to popular pressure and gotten slightly away from his original focus of intense performance with no compromises, and had introduced the 9/9A and the 10, both of which are non-aerobatic and designed moreso for comfortable fun travel. The 9 is essentially a 7 with a slimmer wing for high altitude cruising, and lighter weight by slimming down the structure a bit and in the process giving up the +6G capability. The 10, of course, is his only 4 seat family wagon, albeit still with quite a lot of performance. I looked at my main mission, my typical kind of flying, and realized that since I had gotten my PPL 95+% of my trips had been (and likely would continue to be) solo or one passenger, long distance (200+nm) and occasionally business related - which meant IFR capability. The tandem seating concept never thrilled me, so it would have to be a side-by-side, which left me with the 7, 9, or 10. The 10 was more airplane than I needed since we don't have kids. The 7 and 9 are very close in performance, with the 9 having a slight efficiency edge in long XC flight due to its new wing and lighter weight. The 7 is aerobatic, the 9 is not. I like aerobatics - I think they're fun and moderately cool - but to do them safely you must do them often, and I know myself well enough to know that I would not do them often enough to be really proficient and that makes me an accident statistic waiting to happen, so I decided to remove the temptation and go with the 9. Or actually the 9A, which is the nose-gear version - I never really liked the way taildraggers handled on the ground.
So that's it in a nutshell - life hands you lemons and you make lemonade, or bitch about the lemons. Your choice. I chose to toss the lemons out the window and chase my dreams. See ya at the airport!