KITPLANES September 2025

THE BIG TRIP has been part of my well-ordered existence lately. Perhaps because it is, or just was depending on where you are, summer. Or maybe it’s been simple restlessness. But whatever the reason, my first was when my hangar partner and I headed over the horizon in our biplanes—he has an Acrosport singleseater and I my oft-mentioned Starduster Too. The destination was a tiny gathering of biplane drivers hundreds of miles away at a mutual friend’s house. A private fly-in if you will. It was a fabulous trip. Better, in fact, than I had hoped. Like camping, nothing really happened other than getting through the normal daily activities of shelter, food, and plenty of hangar flying. But there was real flying, too, with local hops to breakfast and down…

MY 2020 OFF-ROAD TRUCK startles me almost every day. I pull up to a drive-through or stop at a stop sign and suddenly—the engine quits! To be honest, this is often not noticeable unless the windows are down, but it happens, by design, whenever the computer thinks you’re going to be stopped long enough that it can save some gas (and emissions) by turning off for a few seconds. This is startling for a driver who is also a pilot because, well—we don’t like engines to stop running without us asking them to do so. Now for someone who is old enough to remember having a manual choke in a car, it is actually quite astounding that the designers of modern engines are confident enough that the motor will restart,…

LEGEND HAS IT that when the British Spitfire returned from its first test flight, Captain Joseph “Mutt” Summers climbed out of the cockpit, hopped off the wing, and told the waiting engineers, “Don’t change a thing—it’s perfect!” If true, then the Spitfire was a rare bird—almost never does a new aircraft live up to its design team’s hopes and dreams right out of the box. An airplane’s first flight is really a new starting point in the development process—the refining of the design to become everything it was intended to be. This is as true in the Experimental aircraft world as it is in the factories of the great production aircraft. I thought about Summers as I flew my RV-8 over the Cascades and descended into Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley…

Why would you want a forgiving landing gear on your backcountry airplane? Well, sometimes the terrain is unforgiving, sometimes the air is unforgiving—and sometimes the population of pilots observing your landing is…well, you get the picture! The RV-15 landing gear is unique enough that Van’s Brian Hickman was awarded a patent on the design. “Leverage-reducing landing gear system, a constant angle suspension landing gear system, or a combination of both systems” (patent #US12330774B1) is a fancy title but in the end—for a pilot—it means a landing gear that absorbs excess vertical energy, preventing a bounce that throws you back in the air. Stiff, spring-style gear tends to reward high-sink-rate arrivals with a second chance to land—but with lower airspeed, poorer control, and the very real possibility of a bad outcome.…

While it has always been straightforward to measure objective aircraft performance with watches, speed indicators, and altimeters, the subjective quality of flight has been more slippery. This is partly because different pilots prefer different characteristics in different airplanes. The Cooper-Harper Scale was developed to give test pilots a uniform method of judging handling qualities by asking them to rate the acceptability/difficulty of the airplane to perform a specific task. For instance, the landing flare: How easy or hard is it for the pilot to complete without compensating for deficiencies? A perfect airplane (“don’t you dare touch it”) is given a rating of 1 while an unflyable airplane gets a 10. The 1 to 10 scale is broken up into four levels: Ratings of 1-3 are acceptable as is, 4-6 “warrant…

As a first for Van’s, does the RV-15’s high wing pose challenges to obtaining the “RV feel”? It is a radical change from Van’s normal low-wing layout after all. The short answer is yes, but not to the point where Van’s combination of stability, maneuverability, and light control pressures can’t be reached. It depends on where on the stability-maneuverability continuum the designers want an airplane to reside followed by the necessary airframe and control tuning work to achieve their goal. As always, the more stable an airplane the less maneuverable it is and vice versa. Failing some extraordinary requirement it’s up to the engineers tuning the airframe to decide how a design should handle. Roll stability is the main variable between high and low wings. Consider a high-wing airplane—the point…