The Ups and Downs of Building an RV
Bob Collins
October 14, 2024
Bob Collins
October 14, 2024
(This is a transcript of the presentation)
Jay Schrankler: If you don't know Bob, he'd probably do a really good job of introducing himself better than me. But he's a pretty famous guy, he's been on the radio, a former journalist. Terrific storyteller. As far as the chapter goes, Bob Is that like the do-it-all guy. So, he maintains this facility. Gets the snacks, runs the movies and the list is endless. So another thing that that Bob volunteered to do was to really work hard on the pancake breakfast and you know, after what 7 years since we had one, I think 2017. And we started out having Marlon and Bob, and I meetings about how to do this. And we would meet at these restaurants or our places. And Bob started drawing pictures of what the layout should look like. And what we ended up with looks almost exactly like what he had sketched out. And I had said to Bob, you should autograph this. So, I've had it framed. (presents frame)
Thank you, Jay, for that overly enthusiastic introduction and I'm afraid Jay has now set you up for an evening of crushing disappointment. I built an airplane once and the airplane is gone and all I'm left with is all these people I knew and know, including everybody in this room and everybody comes with a story, which -- it turned out -- is my favorite part of building an airplane: the people and their stories. So, what I'm going to tell you tonight is not a technical presentation. It's a story, a very long story about those people.
Jay always wants a biography at the beginning, so I'll do that. I was born and raised in Massachusetts although I've been out here in Minnesota now for 32 years.
I wanted to be an astronaut and it turns out I have the proof from Miss Ryan's class in 1964. This was during the Mercury years. But it turns out I have a very bad eyesight. I had it all figured out. I would go into the Air Force. I mean I should have gone into the Navy but I didn't know how to swim. I was going to go to the Air Force Academy and ended up being an astronaut. Well, it didn't work because I didn't have the right vision, I guess.
I flunked shop in junior high school thanks to Tony Provenzano, who was the teacher and like many of the teachers in the early 60s, I think he went right from the beaches of Okinawa in World War II into Junior High shop class. He had us build these things to bring home to our mothers. You know, they would hold potted plants and you had to use a compass to get the little top right. And I could not master the compass. And so he sees this and he he whistles everybody to shut off their machines and he holds mine up and says, 'Oh Mr. Collins has built a drunken potholder.' And I subsequently, I flunked the class, which is a big deal for a guy and I carried that with me a long time although. When I had the RV7 and we would be at the end of the runway and we were about ready to take off. I would turn to the passenger and say, 'you know, I flunk shop,' and off we'd go. That was a big hit.
So anyway, I ended up in the radio business. I started at $110 a week. I would drive 40 miles and I would work six days a week and there was no way I was ever going to be able to learn to fly. But back around '96 or '97, my twin brother came out to visit and we were down in Afton having coffee and we were going over all the things we were never going to do. And I said, "You know, I wanted to fly, but that's never going to happen. I work in radio. And he went home and he called me the next week or so. I think it was our birthday, and he said, " Happy birthday. You start flight lessons tomorrow at Wings in downtown St. Paul."
So my first flight lesson was in June 1997 and that went well. All of my life I wanted to be a pilot in the worst way and the day of my checkride that's exactly what I was. And so we were taxiiing in and I, I said, "When we stop, if you want to open the door and jump out and kiss the ground, I will understand."
I didn't have the money to fly, really. So I started delivering newspapers for the Pioneer Press down in Woodbury seven days a week. I'd get up at 2 in the morning, I go up to the depot, pick up 300 papers and then I would just go throw them, and you had to put them on people's top step back then. And I would get done about 5:30 a.m., and I would go home, have breakfast. Go to bed. Wake up, go to work at MPR at 11 o'clock and work till nine o'clock and then do the same thing over and over again. And I did that for 10 years, but I was able at least to put some money aside to order a tail kit from Van's, but also to rent, a plane at Thunderbird for a while.
I joined EAA 54 in May 1998. And I got this passive aggressive -- what I thought was passive aggressive -- welcome from Dick Wicklund, who was the president at the time. Apparently he was upset that I didn't show up at a banquet. But it was a real good introduction to the the importance of being welcoming as a chapter.
So, years later I was doing the newsletter and every month he would send me from Arizona a criticism of everything that was wrong with the newsletter. It's like, come on, man. I'm not getting paid to do this. And I, when I was doing the renovation here, last winter, I found a email that he had sent to Dale Rupp who was the president at the time. Because I had put in the newsletter that I really could use some articles, he had sent an email to Dale Rupp and said, "perhaps the chapter should take up a collection and buy him a pencil."
Quiz Time!
What is the best reason to build an airplane?
Because you don't want to fly one?
You want to build an airplane?
You want to make a bunch of new friends?
Or you want to buy tools?
All these answers are correct. They're all correct. But there's only one that's actually correct because it's my quiz . It's you want to BUILD an airplane.
I saved up enough money, delivering newspapers to buy my first kit, which in all of Van' s models is the empennage kit- rudder, vertical stabilizer, elevator. I'm pretty sure that I actually bought second ones of these main parts. The rudder and the vertical stabilizer. The RV-7A at the time did not come pre-punched, they had just started pre-punching, everything and they had only gotten up to doing the skins; they didn't do the ribs. So, for the vertical stabilizer, you had to build this jig. It had to be perfectly level and perfectly straight, and then you put the spar across there and then you put the ribs on and then you put the skin over that. But the skins were prepunched; the ribs were not. So you had to draw a line down the exact middle of the ribs. And then line them up with the holes in the skin and drill it and cleco it. And that was kind of a pain in the neck and we were always worried that it would end up being twisted.
On the RV-12, it's a little bit different. You just throw your parts on the workbench and cleco them and rivet it. It's a very simple plane to build any idiot can do it because ever any idiot really is doing t right now down in South Saint Paul.
It's hard to screw it up. It's totally hard to screw it up. So it took 354 hours for the RV-7A empennage kit, which included ordering replacement parts.
It took 480 hours for the wing kit.
The differences between the 12 and the 7 is there are several inspection holes in the 7A because your servo for the autopilot is there, you're running wires out there, and you need to get at the bolts for your fuel tank. The 12 does not have any inspection hole once it's closed up, that's it. If you decided to add something later for wiring and stuff, I hope you ran some string because you're not going to get at it much. I don't care for that particular design.
The 7A has fiberglass wing tips. The 12 has closed, kind of a compound curve metal wingtip with handles because you can take the wings off. Allegedly. It takes two people 10 minutes to take it off.
The autopilot on the 12 is has the servos in the fuselage and one person cannot move the 12 wings. One person can move the 7A wings. They were in my family room downstairs for a good, long time. And eventually I just pushed them out the window onto a pillow and then went around the outside of the house and grabbed them.
LIFE'S PROBLEMS
So, there's this problem with building, which is life often gets in the way. And I ran into that almost immediately. My oldest son was bullied out of 6th grade. This is around the time when we were finding out that an awful lot of Junior High kids were taking their own life. It was a very scary time. And if you ever have had a child in pain, you spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what you can do to make it better and many times, you know, it's out of your control, but you do it anyway.
And it's really hard to be interested in building an airplane in those conditions. So that was the problem with getting the 7A finished.
At the same time, right after I got the wings done, I had a dizzy spell. I came home from work, I wasn't feeling that well and I had a dizzy spell and the ambulance and all those people came and in the process, they heard something bad about my heart apparently. And so they rushed me off to United and I was at, I had like, 35 beats per minute on the heart and I was gray. And I thought I was going to die and I felt so bad at the time, I was perfectly happy with that outcome.
But it turns out that this was a heart condition that I already had, and I've always had. I have an extra heartbeat.
It took me six months to get a medical back. I was done flying at that point because they grounded me and as I look back that was actually one of the first times that I realized - or that I should have realized - that I had Meniere's Disease. It's an affliction of the inner ear. Alan Shepard had it ("Meniere's Disease and the Race to the Moon"). He was not able to fly after he flew the Mercury mission and until late in the Apollo program and that was only a gimme.
But basically, Meniere's first of all leaves you deaf. It usually only affects one ear, mostly in men. These hairs in your ear are surrounded by a liquid. And your hairs move in this fluid as you move to tell your brain which way is up. The hairs die or send bad data into your brain. Your brain is getting information from your eye, your feet, the rest of your body, and it's getting bad information from your ear, but it doesn't know that it's bad information. And so you have these violent vertigo attacks that last for a day or more. And, as it turns out, the FAA is really, really against people who don't know which way is up. So I was grounded again.
My dad died in 2005 and then my mom was swindled by one of these Nigerian dictator things. So, I took over her finances and kind of split up duties among the kids and stuff. And so I entered the sandwich generation, in which you're not only trying to take care of your little kids, you try to take care of your older parents. And so a number of times that RV-7 went up for sale.
HOW N614EF CAME TO BE
Eileen and Fred Collins were married on June 14,1942 She was a 20 year old from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He was 23 from Ashtabula. Ohio, who thought going off to war would be better than staying in Ashtabula. Ohio. He was stationed at the nearby Army base, Fort Devens, and they were married over the objection of his mother, who insisted it would never work. Sixty years later, they celebrated their wedding anniversary.
He died in 2004 and then my mom came out to visit me in 2005 and wanted to go flying. And so we rented a Warrior out at Flying Cloud. But she was 83 at the time and she couldn't step up onto that step of a Warrior to get onto the wing. So she backed herself up to the wing and turned sideways and rolled herself around and around up the wing. And then dumped herself into the cabin. Because she really wanted to go flying with her boy.
We flew around. I was over Sleepy Eye and she said to me that she always wanted to be like Amelia Earhart that she always wanted to learn to fly. So I took my hand off of the wheel and I said, "fly the plane, Amelia" and that's that was a reaction which is one of my, my favorite pictures.
We went down to Fairmont, and we landed, grabbed some crackers, and some soda from the refrigerator and we sat there. It was deadly quiet except for maybe a tractor off in the distance and she said this reminded her of where she grew up in Central Ohio. And so, it was roughly at that point, I think, that I decided what I wanted the N-number on that 7A to be - N614EF - June 14th, Eileen and Fred and that's how, N614EF was born.
BACK TO BUILDING
The fuselage kit, we started in that. 2005. It's probably the biggest part of the RV-7A project. It involves drilling into stainless steel for the firewall, which stinks, you construct the center section and bulkheads. You bend the longerons. They send 3/4 inch angle, and you get to put the twist in it and bend it and they make really cool sounds when you throw them across the garage, because you're tired of trying to get this angle, quite right. But you have to make sure there's no twist in the fuselage. Then you start riveting skins to bulkheads, add the steps, you make the brake and rudder pedals, take it all apart dimple, prime it, and start riveting.
I'm convinced that Van's makes its money on replacement parts.
And then you set it up in your garage. You have to set the wing incidence and make sure there's no forward sweep. And there's a little fork that comes out of the back for the rear spar on your wing. And the stub on the wing fits between this fork that comes out of the fuselage and you have to drill a 5/8 inch hole. And we have to make sure that there is adequate edge distance between where you drill that hole and the edge of that stub. Problem is, when you do this, you cannot see the stub. So you have no idea whether there's enough Edge distance there and of course, because I flunked Junior High School shop, I violated the edge distance. I think I was off by an eighth of an inch. So, I ended up having to drill out everything on that rear spar and and do it all over again. And it was, yeah, that was a blast. (See blog post)
I had delayed asking my wife for her half of the garage for a long time years actually because well, I'm afraid of my wife. But I got to the point where I didn't have any choice. So I asked her, "could I use your half of the garage?" And she said, "absolutely. All you have to do is get up in the morning, go outside, brush off the snow on my car and warm it up for me." And so the next day I went out to South Saint Paul and rented a city hangar.
So, fuselage project 826 hours, so if you're keeping score, we're now up to 1600. Hours.
The RV-12iS that I am building is almost ready to fly. I have 1100 hours. One of the things I like to do is take pieces of people and make them part of my project. And so, it might be, in this case, this was an article, I wrote about cleaning out my dad's barn, The little room we call it. It's where he went up to drink beer so my mother wouldn't see him. (Stirrings From the Empty Nest: "The Little Room")
I kept looking for a tool to bring back and I ended up bringing back a bandsaw and I made sure that I did something on the plane that used that bandsaw so that I could make my dad part of the project, and I did that with as many people as I could. I invited kids in the neighborhood to shoot a rivet or put a Cleco in or something, and you would be amazed at the difference it makes with a kid. There was another kid in the neighborhood I know was mercilessly bullied and so I brought him over and he did some work. You would be amazed at the difference t makes with a kid.
My father-in-law came out in 2007. He had Parkinson's and he was pretty much near the end where he could do anything. I think he was was suffering from some depression from having Parkinson's, and he was a very active guy. And I was working on a little guide for the canopy. And I had him put a Cleco in to hold that in place. And that's the look on his face from a guy who no longer can do a lot but can put a Cleco in an airplane, which was just terrific. And so I had him. autograph it. He could not sign his last name. He'd lost the ability to do much writing, but he signed that and to my knowledge, that's still on the plane.
CRASH
The For Sale sign went up in 2008 because the economy crashed, and I don't know if you remember much about 2008; I've never been so scared in my life. Thee retirement fund disappeared. I didn't have any money left, they were firing people left and right at my workplace. And so, I put it up for sale. This is the part where the RV community came in and got me through this, and convinced me to just push it over in the corner. And deal with it later.
Later, we went to put the engine on. This is Gary Speketer, what I think was at one point based in Lake Elmo. We had six people come over to learn how to put an engine on, and Gary was the only one who knew how, so, we put that on and around this time.
Budd Davisson did a story for EAA Sport Aviation (January 2013) on the plane, which was becoming a little bit famous.
And in the process, they made a mistake and ran a picture of Gary's plane. And so Gary sent in a letter. To them and said, hey you know that's my plane. And to make up for it, they put another picture of Gary's plane in there. (See "Maybe I Don't Really Have an Airplane")
AVIONICS
This is about the time I started learning a new language, which was electrical systems.
The problem with the Van's and any other experimental airplane is they'll sell you an airframe kit. They'll give you all the help you need with an airframe kit, but when it comes to the engine or avionics or electrical, you are on your own now. You are required at that point to learn. And when you think the experimental category is all about recreation and education, and that's the education part. And I would read Bob Nuckoll's AeroElectric Connection, and I read it about 12 times, I'm not an engineer. And I've read it about 12 times and on the 13th time, it started to connect and so I designed this particular system around a Vertical Power 50. Marc Ausman, who started Vertical Power, I had done an interview with him. It's a solid-state unit. You just run your wire, plug it in, you can set it the amps and everything and then assign it to a switch that's on your panel. It's a great. It was a great little unit. But then like one thing you have to remember is these companies were coming and going in a pretty rapid clip and it was a pretty good chance you were going to end up with an orphaned a piece of avionics.
With the RV-12iS avionics package, you get two choices Dynon or Garmin. Pick one and when you do all the adding up of all the numbers, it roughly comes out to about the same. So, I ended up going with Garmin. I haven't got a clue how it works. I bought the training thing, I'm bought a ground power unit to sit and try to figure out all of this stuff that it can do.
Tom Berge ("An Interview with Tom Berge") did an inspection before the DAR would come over (See: "The Pre-inspection Inspection"). He found a bunch of stuff. None of them were particularly important. But the DAR, once he saw Tom Berge had already inspected it, he hardly looked at the plane at all.
All the time I was finishing, I was thinking of this guy. This is Dan Lloyd from Pennsylvania. He really wanted to get his plane in the air because he wanted to get to Oshkosh. He built an RV-10 And when he had his first flight, he still had Clecos holding parts of it together. He never calibrated the engine instruments. And one other thing you have to do with the engine instruments is calibrate the RPM. He never did that. So he was getting warnings while he was flying and rather than stop and say "why don't I calibrate this thing"? He went to all the forums and said "how can I get rid of these alarms?"
He never really did a 40-hour phase one testing. He just made a note in his logbook that he had done it, but he didn't really do it. And the day he crashed and killed himself, that afternoon, he was supposed to fly his family to Boston for a vacation.
I sent out a link when I put out the Beacon to the NTSB report. You really should read it because it's fascinating reading.
So the RV-7A is done at 3,019 hours and 11 years.
Tom Berge was my test pilot. He knew the plane inside and out because he'd done the inspection. But he still took about two hours to learn the instrument panel. (See "I Built That")
It was a really nice moment. But this is the one that was nicer:
I finished with the same spouse I had started with. Carolie isn't into flying, but she was fully supportive of the project.
So, here's the lessons. I learned:
GROUNDED
I made a mistake of going to an AME and when they asked, "are you on any prescriptions?" For some reason, I wrote down Benadryl, which at that time, I was taking just to get to sleep. The guy kicked it down to Oklahoma City because of Benadryl and that was dumb of me. But the Meniere's is what they ended up discovering and finding, which is a disqualifying condition. The "for sale" sign went up again.
In most cases, the Meniere's only stays in one ear. But around 2016 it jumped to the good ear. And I was on a special issuance at that time and I knew they weren't going to renew that special issuance. So on this RV-12, I don't even know if I'm gonna fly. I suspect not.,
So it's just the way it goes. So this was a good time to get it into the paint shop. I used Midwest Aircraft Refinishing up in Hibbing. They were a bunch of Cirrus guys basically. They're really great and this was inspiration.
And so, this is what I came up with. The scheme they came up with where you can't really tell where the fiberglass is because we swoop everything.
So I flew to Oshkosh with the kids (See "Three Days of Oshkosh"). This is the little girl next door, who did some work. She ended up being a teacher down in Cannon Falls, and that was her expression when she saw the Cannon River Valley for the first time (See "A ride for 'the little girl next door'"). And then my wife liked to go up to Sky Harbor. I gave rides to people at a wedding up, in Williamstown, Massachusetts (NewsCut: "The Art of Raising Children in the World"). We went out to see Brian Setzer and George Thorogood out in Morton Minnesota, Jackpot Junction. (See "An RV Takes Us to Rockabilly") We had flown out there and we had motel reservations and so we landed at this the airport in the middle of nowhere. And we traipsed through this farm implements dealer to get to the motel and the motel didn't have our reservations. So we thought, "well, we'll just dump our bags here and we'll go out to the concert." It was a great concert. We got back, the motel still didn't have our reservation, and there weren't any rooms in town because the bird flu had broken out and they had all the people that were in the business of killing turkeys take up all the rooms so we had to jump back in the plane at 1:30 in the morning and fly back and then it was really nice and some really smooth air at 1 30 in the morning.
This guy or this woman - this is Sue and Gary - her brother, mother, and, I think, sister-in-law were killed in Glencoe. It was a typical stall spin accident. She had sent me an email because I think I had written about it for the day job. She wanted to know more about what happened and I said, "why don't I come up and talk to you about it?" And so, I flew up to Alexandra and we had a nice conversation. I was glad I did that, she felt better. (See "Aid and Comfort")
And then we always had to keep the hangar door open so if kids came by they could sit in the plane and make airplane noises.
But one of the things I really wanted to do was see this woman and get her on the plane. But that was a long way away. That's half a country away. For me, I was really nervous about it. I met this guy, Daniel Alvarez from Tallahassee. He was going to canoe or a kayak from the Northwest Angle down to Key West going down the Mississippi River, which he did and got down there and didn't know what to do. So, he kayaked back along the Atlantic Seaboard. (Newscut: "The Northwest Angle to Key West")
So, I interviewed the guy for my day job on like a Friday, and a few days later, I'm crossing the Wakota Bridge and I looked down, and I see this guy kayaking and it's Daniel.
And so he pulls over to the boat ramp in South Saint Paul and we start talking and he says, "So, where was it you wanted to fly to?" And I said, "well, I'd really like to fly to Massachusetts but it's really far for me and I'm really nervous about that, and I don't know the airspace or any of that stuff, it's a single engine plane." And he said, "If you weren't nervous, you'd need to dream bigger."
This is something he wrote on his blog and then he sent me this picture of this guy he met because he had also done the Appalachian Trail.
This guy he met on the Appalachian Trail with one leg who was walking the entire Appalachian Trail. So I thought, "OK, well, flying to Massachusetts can't be much of a big deal" and so, the next day, I started planning the trip. (See "The Trip Home")
I flew direct to Joliet because Doug Weiler of the RV group in the Twin Cities said don't go over the lake. At Joliet I make a turn east up toward Lake Erie. (See: "The Trip Home")
Over Cleveland, I lost my transponder. I was at 9000 feet, I think I was over the lake trying to avoid Class B.
And ATC says, "well, we're bringing planes in at nine and ten thousand feet, but we don't have your transponder and you're at nine and 10,000 ft." And I'm like, "well, what do you want me to do about it?" But it worked out to fine. By the way, if you have never landed at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland (we did a year later), you've got to do it. It's like Meigs Field, right on Lake Erie, easy walk to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the USS Cod submarine, or you could walk over to the baseball game. It's a really great spot which they want to close. So if you want to do that, do it quickly.
I made a pit stop in Sydney, New York, near Binghamton, across the Hudson River. Over Massachusetts. That's Mount Greylock highest peak in Massachusetts and that is where my wife is from. And then I circled my boyhood home and then went right down my hometown, and by BF Brown Junior, High School where Tony Provenzano said I'd never be able to build anything.
And I had dinner with my mom.
The next day I introduced her to the plane. She was 97 at this point and wasn't going to get into an RV, so I did a couple of low passes.
Three days before I left, I went to an AOPA seminar at that hotel across from the 3M. That was about real world weather, and was all about VFR Pilots straying into IMC. So, of course, on the flight home, I strayed into IMC. Um, it was crappy weather to start with, but I took off anyway, because I had to get home. (See "The Time I Almost Killed Myself")
And so, I take off, the ceilings coming down lower and lower and lower. I find a hole in the clouds that go up on top.
I'm looking ahead, and I'm seeing what I believe to be clouds much higher than where I was on top. And, for some reason, I just totally spazzed out. I was like, who can I call to find an open field?
Pittsfield in The Berkshires where I used to work, and where I met my wife, was reporting broken clouds when I took off, but now it was overcast. So I got over Pittsfield and what did I do? I decided to do a descending turn directly over the airport through the clouds into Pittsfield. And I remember, because I used to work there, that there's a ski area right next to the airport. How high was that ski area? Well I kept that turn very tight. I'm at 5,000. Uh, they're reporting overcast at like 2500. I don't know where that ski area is but I kept circling through the clouds. And as I'm doing that, my air speed is going up, my air speed is going down, my air, speed's going up. My air speed's going down. I know what's happening, but I cannot get in front of that airplane. I'm still doing a circling descent in clouds and I'm losing control of the airplane, and it was right around the time when I thought, "Oh boy, the people back home are going to love this one." And then I broke out right over the airport at which time, I heard a guy announced he was on an ILS approach to the runway.
I had just been to that seminar, and I did it anyway. Which was a real lesson on how powerful GetHomeitis is. I ended up spending the night in Elmira because the storms were coming through and I got up the next day and did the same thing basically running scud over Northwest Pennsylvania, which is a pretty rugged country.
It was just stupid.
All right, feature presentation. AOPA gives away an airplane every year to some subscriber of theirs that they pull out of that hat. I got a phone call from Dave Hirschman at AOPA. He said, "we think you can put something together for us. We want to give this guy. We have this new Debonair... restored Debonair, and we want to give it away to this guy that won and the guy that won. He has an RV, so we think you can pull something together, but what we want is we want to give it away in midair. And we want you to be in that plane, shooting the video of the moment as we pull up alongside and give him, uh, the airplane."
So, I thought, okay, well give me a couple days to come up with a plan and think about it. So what I came up with is I would call this guy. I would get all my RV friends together out of South Saint Paul. And I would tell him that every Saturday we throw a dart onto a map of Minnesota and we go find if there's an RV person on that field. And then we go off and take them to lunch and stuff. And he bought it; he was a little suspicious but he bought it anyway. And I would get into his plane by, you know, coming up with a story.
So when I was talking to him, he said "well why don't we go over to Winsted? Because they have parachuters we can watch?" And I thought that's great, because I think Winsted might be the grass strip. I'm not sure. And I told him because it's an RV tri-gear, we don't like landing on grass strips, can I fly with you? He said, okay, so that's how I got in his airplane and the way it would work is the Debonair, with all the big shots from AOPA, would be orbiting over here to the east of Winsted, while we were watching the parachuters, and then when we would take off, we would let him know and then he would catch up to all of us.
Like most perfect plans, it doesn't survive the first contact with the enemy. So we do the mission briefing. We have eight RV pilots. We go over this whole plan, we're going to go in, we can take them over to Winsted. We're going to get up, everybody get out of the way because they're going to bring the Debonair up.
Mark Baker, the president of AOPA and Katie Pribyl, who's number two, they flew out from Frederick, Maryland in their corporate jet. And at Anoka, where Mark has a plane, they call the wife of the winner so that they can while we're off in Winsted, they can set up and bring the family in and prepare for a big air show.
The problem is that the weather is not parachute weather. So we land and we meet this guy, Steve Lagergren, says, "yeah, there's no parachuting at Winsted." So I'm thinking, "Oh my God, how am I going to get this guy in the air?" So, he mentioned that he has a friend over in Hutchinson who's building an RV-9A. I said, "Let's go to Hutchinson."
And so, we take off to Hutchinson, all nine of us. I'm sending a text to Tom Horne, who's flying the Debonair that we're now going to Hutchinson. We landed in Hutchinson, and I jump out right away and get to this guy's friend and say we need to get to Winsted, we gotta come up with something because this is what's going to happen. We're going to give this guy an airplane. So he says, "I have a friend over in Winsted, who's got some really neat projects over there." And so, we all quickly take off to Winsted. Now I'm sending another text to Tom Horne saying "well I'm going to Winsted."
We visit, we fly to Winsted, which looks like freaking O'Hare; we had so many RVs on final. And we're visiting and I'm just trying to get a hold of Tom Horne.
So eventually we take off.
This is what actually happened.
I told so many lies that day.
So, Steve calls me that night. And he says, "they didn't even give me a tow bar." But they gave him was a very large stack of receipts because this is a tax deal for all the companies that do anything to improve the Debonair, and they want their biggest tax break they can get. So, their invoices show their contributions cost the most amount of money and so he had figured out that the tax hit was going to be something like $56,000, which is why most people sell these things.
But it turns out that first of all, it fits his mission because these girls were going to go off to college and they have now since graduated college, but he wanted to keep it. He had a partnership along with his RV-7. He had a partnership in a Cardinal. So, he ended up selling the partnership to his partner and then paid for the taxes.
Not too long after this, the Meniere's did its thing. And so I sold it to a neat guy who one of the first things he said to me when he came into the hangar was "I don't have any living relatives, and I thought "sold!". So I ended up taking off and and ferrying it over to Grand Rapids. Michigan on the coldest day of the year, it was 17 below zero when I took off, but by this time, I just wanted to get rid of the damn airplane because we had many starts and stops because of the lake effect snow. And as I got into Grand Rapids approach, they closed the airport because of a squall. So I landed at this airport not far away. Figuring I would spend the night there and I would just go out every hour and start the plane, but then they opened it up. And this is me spending my last few minutes with the plane that I got to know for four years and 310 hours.
And then everybody at work said made a sympathy card, which was just so sweet of them.
And finally,
The guy that bought the plane now, has a family member. He met a woman and took her flying in my now former airplane and they fell in love. And they got married and they invited me to the wedding but it was during COVID. So that's airplane's still out there and still making people happy.
I apologize for taking so much time but thank you.
Additional reading:
Letter to a Friend
One Last Flight
