KITPLANES April 2025

IT STARTED SIMPLY ENOUGH. With a mistake. OK, maybe just a misapplication of learned behavior. I’ll back up a couple of steps to explain. Roughly a year ago, in the midst of a comprehensive instrument-panel rework in my GlaStar, I’d decided to apply a lesson taught to me by my Sportsman way back in, oh, 2008. Then, I’d finished a similar panel rework and decided I would act like the pros—prime and paint everything before I put it back together and, surely, enjoy the shiny fruits of my labor soon after. If only. The whole mess got into the airplane and, in part because I was prototyping some components, panel sections and avionics were in and out so often it was almost impossible to keep the finishes nice. No amount…

ANY PILOT WHO has been flying for a few years has run into this situation: You cancel a trip for some reason—weather, most often—and as things develop, it turns out that you probably could have flown as you had planned. We tend to look at these situations and say, “Well that was a bad decision. I got that one wrong.” But this is absolutely not the right way to think about it. If you made a decision based on your own “go/no-go” criteria and the information that you had at the time you made the decision didn’t meet the “go” criteria, then your decision was a good one, regardless of how the day eventually turned out. A decision that turns out later to be incorrect isn’t a “bad” one, so…

THERE IS SOMETHING proportionally humorous about an airplane that you are taller standing next to than when you’re sitting in the cockpit. Your basic “I’m going to trust my life to your wings, if I don’t trip over them first” incongruity. Yet some of the smallest aircraft have the potential to be the most endearing. The first few that come to mind are the Cassutt Racer, the Flying Flea, the Hawk 6 and Mew Gull (if you love diving into the history of rare British/European aircraft) or in this case the Baby Lakes. Better known as the Oldfield Baby Great Lakes, it was designed and first built by Barney Oldfield in the 1950s as a scaled-down homebuilder variation of the Great Lakes Sport Trainer. Oldfield had no relation to the…

TWO HOURS’ DRIVE east from Prague, across rolling green countryside and along poppy lined roads, lies Vysoke Myto, a quiet Czech town that is home to the production facilities for JMB Aircraft. For 20 years, the factory has produced the VL3, a sporty and fast two-seat retractable with a composite airframe, generating hundreds of airplanes that fly mostly in Europe. Purchased by Jean-Marie Guisset in 2012, the Belgian company’s development has centered on refining the airframe design and its production facilities. JMB improved the efficiency of the wing and refined the interior and avionics, while marrying the airframe to ever more sophisticated and powerful Rotax engines. These changes turned a niche airplane into a serious two-person cross-country machine. In fact, JMB boasts a nonstop westbound crossing in a VL3 between…

I SAW MY FIRST 3D PRINTER in a shop setting about five or six years ago. My initial impression was that it was a) a toy and b) too small to be of much use. But the guys in that shop were a bunch of smart dudes, so I figured there might be something to this 3D printing craze. I’m always open to trying new technology in the shop, even if half the time it doesn’t really pan out (I’m not sure my Shaper Origin CNC manual router will ever make it into an article, I use it so little). So I did my research and settled on a Prusa MK3S+ additive printer. It was around $800 and required assembly. I liked the assembly option so I could get an…

IN THE OCTOBER 2023 issue of KITPLANES my article “Out of the Shadows” appeared, in which I contemplated how my RV-8A was then a counterbalance to my wife’s medical issues. Lisa had gone to Oasis of Hope in Mexico in 2020 for three weeks of cancer treatment. This was for triple negative breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with on Nov. 7, 2019. That article ended well. The rest of the story does not. Lisa was a pilot, though she only flew as PIC one time before having our first child (she was pregnant with him as she was working on her certificate). She helped with the RV construction as she could, but that became more limited as one, then two, then three kids came into our world. It may…