Why is Dave building an airplane?
I have wanted to fly for a long time, but the economics just didn’t work out. Flight lessons are expensive. That was the major hurdle for quite a while. Once I got to a point where I could afford the lessons, I realized that was just the start. Buying or renting a plane is very expensive as well. Renting a base Cessna in the Seattle area is around $100/hr. Buying a plane was way out of the question. A new low-end Cessna goes for $164k. And that is not an exciting plane. We’re talking max speed of 123 knots. A decent (20-30 year old) used Cessna goes for about $100k.
At that point, I wrote off the idea of flying. Then I learned about a project my friend Jeff is working on. He is building his own plane. It sounded crazy at the time, but I investigated further. The more I looked into it, the more I was convinced that building is a great option. One thing I hadn’t previously considered was the cost of airplane maintenance. If you build your own plane, you can do the maintenance yourself. After reading Dan’s reasons for kit-building, I was really convinced.
It was then just a matter of figuring out which plane to build. Jeff is building a Van’s RV-7A. Van’s kits are the most popular around. From everything I’ve heard and read, the kits are good quality, have good instructions, and there is a ton of help out there when (not if) I get stuck on a problem. That’s the right combination for me. The only remaining decision was which model. I know my wife and daughter would not like the tandem seating, so that left the RV-7. The new 4 place RV-10 is very attractive, but the down sides are that it is more expensive and doesn’t have any aerobatic ability. I don’t know if I’ll enjoy aerobatics, but I’d like to have that option open. For the times when I want to take the whole family somewhere, I’ll rent a larger plane.