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EAA’s local chapters are about people, bringing together individuals interested in learning more about aviation as well as sharing their own knowledge.  Chapter members are involved in a variety of social and educational activities, including Young Eagles rallies, fly-ins, building seminars, and more, to build awareness in the community.

EAA Sport Aviation Magazine Article, December 5, 2001 - Author: Kim Rosenlof - Photos courtesy of: Roy Castle

First and Last: "With the Help of Some Friends, Roy Castle Finishes and Flies a Project he Started in 1978"

WHEN EAAERS ARE INVOLVED, anything is possible. Just ask 87-year-old Leroy "Roy" Castle of Phoenix, Arizona. Wheelchair bound and suffering from prostate cancer that's spread, he got to fly in the airplane he started building in 1978. Little more than a year ago Roy thought he'd never see his Stits Playmate finished, let alone fly in it. But both dreams came true at Phoenix Deer Valley Airport on August 18, 2001, thanks to fellow EAA member Richard DeWitt, who finished building Roy's airplane, flew off its flight-test time, and took him flying in Roy's first and only homebuilt aircraft. "I don't know what can surpass this," Roy told a reporter from The Arizona Republic moments afte r they landed. "Maybe just to live a little longer." According to Richard, Roy's smile of nearly unsurpassed joy lingered well beyond that 20- minute flight. Roy's interest in aviation was kindled early in life. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1914, Roy spent a great deal of time during his younger years at the town's Watson Airport, at which his father was the airport manager and ran an aircraft mechanics and flight school. Roy loved flying, but he was prevented from taking up flying as a career since every time he went up, he was afflicted with severe airsickness.

"When I worked at the airport with Dad, I would do anything to get a ride in an airplane," Roy reminisced in an interview at the 1'hoenix home in which he's lived (or more than 30 years. "There was an outfit called Gate's Hying Circus that used to barnstorm the whole United States. When they came to our airport, I'd haul gasoline for the group, help park cars, and he their gofer so I could get a ride at the end of the day. Then when we went up, I'd get deathly sick. Sometimes I'd be sick for two days after the flight." Though discomforting, Roy's airsickness didn't dampen his enthusiasm for flying. He continued working at the airport through his teenage years, building dozens of Waco ribs and learning to spray paint the fabric aircraft. "Everything was cloth in those days," Roy recalls. "When we painted an aircraft, we laid out the N numbers in full size, not in the tiny letters you have now." Roy transferred his early aircraft building experience to a job in the steel industry, where he worked up through World War II. Landing a job at Youngstown's Truscon Steel Company, a subsidiary of Republic Steel. At first Roy helped manufacture thousands of steel landing planks used during the war, but he soon transferred into the aircraft department. "I helped build firewall to the back of the cockpits of torpedo bombers," said Roy. "I also built ailerons and tail surfaces for these same planes." Following an accident that prevented him from continuing in the steel industry, Roy, his wife, and their four kids moved to Arizona in 1947. To make ends meet he started working at a Mobil gas station in Phoenix, which was a much smaller town at the time. There he ran into a bit of luck. A former supervisor from Truscon Steel was the human resources director at a Borden mil k plant, and he hired Roy on sight. Roy worked there for 29 years, retiring in 1979. Rekindling his interest in aviation, Roy joined Phoenix's EAA Chapter 538 in 1971. "I was 57 or 58 years old at the time," Roy said, noting that he thought his airsickness problem would prevent him from ever being a pilot. "My idea for joining EAA was that since I got too sick to fly, at least I'd get to be around other airplane people," Roy said. "Then one of the Chapter members, Dave Smedley, took me flying, and I took a sick sack with me. He took it real easy, doing straight-and-level flying, and I didn't get sick. Then we went out the next week, and I still didn't get sick, so I went straight to his office to sign up for flying lessons." Roy said he was fine on "straight-and-level" flying, but when it came time to do the required steep turns about a point and stalls, he started getting sick again. "After I started to learn to fly, I had 40 hours in but still hadn't soloed because I filled a sick sack every time!" Finally Roy's instructor sent him to a flight surgeon who helped him remedy the problem, and Roy was able to finish his instruction in the rented Cessna 150. In the next 20 years, Roy flew a variety of aircraft out of several Phoenix-area airports that have long since been swallowed up by commercial development. "I used to meet the Smedley brothers out at the old Turf airport on 19th Avenue," said Roy. "Then when that airport closed, we flew out of the old Glendale airport on Olive and Grand Avenue, which is where Chapter 538 was meeting. That airport has also since been closed."

Finding a Playmate: Roy started building his Playmate in 1978 after purchasing the partly built project for $2,800 from a gentleman in Jefferson City, Missouri. Ray Stits designed and introduced the two-place low wing tube-and-fabric monoplane in the late 1960s. According to a June 1968 EAA Sport Aviation article, the Playmate is "a fun airplane...stable, easy to fly, and responsive on the controls." With a 27.5 foot wingspan and an overall length of 18.5 feet, the Playmate can cruise at 110 mph with a 125-hp Lycoming engine. For his Playmate Roy used the ground power unit engine that came with the project. It was not coincidence that a Playmate was Roy's first—and last—project. "My daughter, Judy, worked with a fellow who had a Playmate and flew it to Oshkosh," Roy recalled. "He knew I was interested in flying, so we went for a ride in it, and I got to fly it quite a bit. I liked the way it flew, so that's when I decided that's what I would build." Roy attended the 1977 EAA convention at Oshkosh and saw a Playmate from Zion, Illinois, which strengthened his love for the airplane, and he had a chance to talk to Stits himself. "Ray Stits had quit making plans by that time due to insurance scares," Roy said. "But when he got home, he sent me a list of everyone who had bought plans, and I started writing letters. I finally got a hold of one started in Virginia and then sold to this guy in Missouri."

When Roy purchased the Playmate project, the steel frame had been tacked together but still needed to be finish welded. The tail surfaces were generally finished, except for installing the trim tab. The project included an instrument panel and various instruments, the wooden wing spars, sections of tubing, fiberglass nose bowl, and fiberglass trim for the canopy. Roy was able to purchase a few additional items for the Playmate from Stits' inventory, but he fabricated the rest of the aircraft, including the tricky folding wings. The Playmate's folding wings are one of the aircraft's most interesting, although hard-to-build, features. A locking lever, held in place by a 3/8- inch pin when the lever passes over center, holds the wings in place. With the pin removed and the lever unlocked, the wings swing back and up, over the horizontal stabilizer. Like a Kitfox, you don't need to disconnect the controls to fold the wings. The entire folding process can take as little as 26 seconds, and the unfolding process can take as little as 16 seconds, said the EAA Sport Aviation article. To make the wings fold properly, there is a lot of geometry to designing the pivoting mechanism. It was all spelled out on Stits' plans, but the blueprints were hard to read and understand. Still, Roy followed Stits' design to the letter and was able to get the folding wings to work. "The most challenging part of building the airplane was getting it from paper to reality," said Roy. "It was one of the reasons that the aircraft didn't go over big. Hundreds of people bought the plans, but not that many were finished." Roy said that trying to figure out the plans in three dimensions was sometimes nearly impossible. "There was one steel strut that would fasten to the motor mount, " Roy recalled. "You had to get just the right slope in three dimensions and then figure out where to put the bushings. It was not easy."

Family Support Goes Far: Roy's family didn't necessarily share his love affair with flying, but they still supported his aerial endeavors. Roy built the Playmate on the back porch of the family's modest Phoenix home, and his wife, Myrtle, dealt with stashes of tools, parts, and half-built pieces of airplane all around the house. And she became involved with his EAA activities, becoming secretary of Chapter 538, hosting Chapter holiday parties at their home and volunteering alongside Roy at EAA conventions in Oshkosh. She also tagged along when Roy became active in the EAA Copperstate Regional Fly-In, an annual event that has been held in Arizona for nearly 30 years. "Roy had already become a fixture at Copperstate when I first started volunteering in 1979," said Bob Hasson, president of the Arizona Council of EAA Chapters, the organization that hosts the Copperstate Fly-In. "Roy and Myrtle were firmly entrenched in the council's affairs by the time I became president. For years, Roy and I were the first ones on-site setting up Copperstate and the last ones to leave. In these last years, I've truly missed having Roy out there in the last few hours picking up the little bits of paper, trying to leave the airport in better shape than we found it." Roy contributed brains, brawn, and skill to the Copperstate Fly-In, serving as council secretary for more than a decade and assisting in the physical setup of the fly-in site. And Roy made every plaque presented to Copperstate award winners, shaping the wood to match Arizona's border with a router and hand hammering the copper plate logos to decorate them. "I told him years ago to stop hand making those plaques," said Hasson, who estimated Roy has made approximately 20 plaques each year for more than two decades. "Roy is just someone who is always there when something needs to be done." 

Mutual Benefit: Roy worked on his Playmate steadily for more than 15 years, in between volunteering for EAA at both the Chapter and state levels and staying involved with his kids' and grandkids' lives. He had been 64 when he purchased the project, and in 1993 tragedy struck. In 1993 Roy suffered a heart attack and underwent triple bypass surgery. Suffering from a blood clot 10 days after the surgery, Roy started taking blood-thinning medication. When Roy reapplied for his medical certificate later, this medication caused a problem, even though he was no longer taking it. "I went to two different flight doctors, and both said that it would cost more than it was worth to fight it," said Roy sadly. "The main thing that slowed me down on building the airplane was losing my license." Roy just didn't have the enthusiasm for working on an airplane that he could never fly, and soon, starting to feel his age, he got to the point where he just couldn't physically get underneath the aircraft anymore. That was where Richard DeWitt came in. "I had finished an RV-6 about six years before, and I was getting the itch to build something again," said Richard. "But all of the homebuilt designs I looked at were too expensive. I didn't want to lay out $15,000 to $20,000 just for an airplane to take out on weekends." Richard is the product of an early introduction to aviation. In the 1930s his father performed as a barnstorming pilot, his mother sold tickets, and the family operated an FBO on Chicago's Howell field. Not afflicted by airsickness like Roy, Richard soloed the family's J-3 Cub when he was 16 and earned his pilot certificate at 17, in 1957. Attending a small aviation college in Lockport, Illinois, Richard didn't finish his degree, opting instead to enlist in the U.S. Army as a missile radar technician. He continued flying for fun through the 1950s and 1960s hut Inter stopped flying at his wile's insistence. He didn't start flying until 1984. Shortly thereafter he joined FAA Chapter 538, where he became friends with Roy. About a year ago, partially out of respect to see Roy's aircraft finished and partially out of desire to continue working on an aircraft, Richard approached Roy with an offer to complete and certificate the aircraft if he could fly it. Roy enthusiastically agreed. "When I took over construction of the plane, I was amazed to see that it was just about finished," said Richard. "The structure was completely covered, all metalwork was done, and the cowling was fitted. I had to manufacture a few fittings, but other than that, the only major thing left was to finish fabricating and assembling the windshield." Although the aircraft was virtually complete, Richard went through the engine and aircraft to ensure both were sound. And there were a few airworthiness directives (ADs) to comply with, such as putting new solid venturi tubes in the carburetor instead of the original split tubes and changing the original composite float to a metal one. Richard noted that even though the aircraft was under construction for more than 20 years and used a non-certificated engine, the FAA certificated it without a problem. "FAA inspector Mac Childress had known Roy for years and knew the background of the plane," said Richard. "Roy kept a thorough logbook, and we had all the paperwork ready when it came time to certify the airplane." Richard worked on the aircraft for the next year, making the first flight on June 28, 2001. "He fooled me, and I wasn't even there for the first flight," lamented Roy. "Il e told me he was going to fly on Friday, but he flew it Thursday instead and then called me Thursday night to let me know." A bit chagrined, Richard said, "I'm hesitant to make a first flight in front of an audience. I don't like flying in front of a lot of people, so I wanted to do the first flight by myself, just to make sure." Roy would have to wait almost two months for his first ride in the aircraft he spent more than 20 years building. Because the Playmate's engine is not certificated, FAA regulations require 40 hours of Phase I solo test flights before it is legal to carry passengers. As soon as Richard had completed the required flight-test time, they set the date—August 18—for Roy's first flight in Stits Playmate N538LC (538 for his EAA Chapter and LC for Leroy Castle). It was his airplane, the one he'd poured his heart and soul into for more than two decades, and one he once thought he'd never see fly, much less fly in. "Richard resurrected the airplane," Roy said. "Even though it was nearly completed, I just didn't have the heart or strength to finish it. It just sat for several years." Confined to a wheelchair and breathing oxygen, Roy probably will not get to fly in his Playmate again. But his single flight, made possible thanks to the help of a fellow EAA member and friend, brings joy to his face whenever he thinks of it. From his involvement in the Chapter to all levels of Copperstate, Roy's impact on EAA in Arizona has been felt for several decades. Chapter 538 has recently changed its name to the Roy Castle EAA Chapter in his honor, and the Arizona Council of EAA Chapters is working to establish a monument in his honor at Phoenix Regional Airport, the new home of the Copperstate Fly-In. And thanks to Richard DeWitt, Roy's Playmate will continue to be a flying tribute to a beloved EAAer who embodies the spirit and passion of aviation.