Builders;
Yesterday, Brad Boon of Wisconsin, took his first flight in the 601HDS he built. There are a lot of good elements to this, but let me focus on the one that matters most: He took 12 years to complete this project, it spanned his life through all of the changes experienced from age 27 to 39. It flew yesterday for the simple reason that he did not quit.
If that sounds pleasantly simple, you haven’t yet thought about it enough. We live in a society obsessed with disposable everything. It is a fundamental requirement of consumerism that everything needs an ever shorter life cycle to replacement, so the machine, driven now by social media peer pressure as much as marketing, keeps people on a treadmill of buying junk which by its very design, can not allow you to find peace or satisfaction, because it would be harder to sell you the next thing you never needed.
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While most people can clearly see the machinery aspect of this, 84 month car loans on vehicles that don’t have warranties that long, sold to people on credit who stand a good chance of transferring the balance of that debt to the next car. That is easy to see……What is much harder to admit is how far these forces have gotten into our heads, and how far they have succeeded in getting people to think of their dreams as disposable. If you bristle at accepting this, let me offer the observation from 35 years of working with homebuilders: More builders quit today than they did years ago, in spite of kits being better, support being better, tools being cheaper and choices being better. What has changed?
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Builders have allowed themselves to be told that their fundamental, pure ambition in hard core homebuilding isn’t good enough. They are lured to watch some scam promotion or read some glowing review of a non-existent figment of marketing, instead of going out to the shop to put in another hour toward achieving the goal they selected as a good match for them as an individual.
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Brad’s aircraft is a mechanical achievement. At 715 pounds, I’m pretty sure it is the lightest Corvair powered low wing Zenith ever. It ran perfectly on the engine he built himself. Even as a 125 hour pilot, the planes predicable behavior was a good match for his old school flight instruction and recent refresher instruction. All good things, but above all else, focus on this: In a disposable world when you are told to let go of your personal dreams and ambitions and allow them to be replaced with “trends” , Brad’s plane is done and flying because he ignored such garbage, trusted that he was the person to decide what is in his own interest, and he went out to put in one more hour on his project, until it was done. If you follow the same mindset, your aircraft will also be completed, but most important, it will be done on our own terms.
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601HDS models are frequently 100 pounds lighter than XL or 650 models. The planes are in the same design family, and they share a few components, but the HD’s and HDS’s are older, smaller and simpler. All things have trade offs. XL’s and 650’s have a wider flight envelope and more space inside. People who will never complete either model will argue their respective merits on the internet, while the builders go to the shop for another working hour to advance their own ambitions.
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The first flight: Brad shared these pictures, and we spent a half hour on the phone last night. He also shared some brief notes on my Facebook Group “WW Flycorvair”. That venue is good for pictures, quick comments and news, but the kind of thought I’m sharing above fits better here. Even though I run a very tight ship on my FB group, and I have a zero tolerance policy for trolls , people combing through social media tend to be looking for snack food, not food for thought.
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WW
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