![]() On the other hand, in case of mishap, the customer’s number-one legal target is himself, as manufacturer and chief mechanic. Since the FAA does not certify unassembled kit helicopter models as airworthy, it offers no opinion on such matters. They can choose to ship whatever engine suits their fancy, or can leave the choice to the buyer, who could use a rotary engine from a Mazda RX-7 if he could adapt the power train. On one hand, the sellers of such kits can be agile and adaptive, which helps keep production costs low. When all checks are done and forms completed, the customer finds that he or she is the manufacturer of a new aircraft, as well as its mechanic, notwithstanding the lack of an airframe-and-powerplant license. They’re all over the place-doctors, farmers, not just people who don’t have enough money to get a production machine.” The kit helicopter community is much smaller than the fixed-wing kit builders, but the skills cross over: It’s not unusual to find helicopter builders whose stables house a Van’s RV-10 or other homebuilt airplane. Although this entry-level niche took a hit when the $40,000 Robinson R22 production helicopter debuted in 1979, the homebuilt industry still sells hundreds of kits per year for construction under the Federal Aviation Administration’s amateur-built, experimental category.Īccording to Homer Bell, who taught himself to fly in a two-seat RotorWay Scorpion Too in the first wave of kit-copter enthusiasm and is now a consultant to home helicopter builders, “There’s no single type of customer. ![]() Two-seater Scorpion and later Helicom kits were challenging even for the mechanically gifted, but cost less than $7,000 in 1975, one quarter the price of a Hughes 300 two-seater. Schramm and Robert Everts, who designed the Scorpion (first named the Javelin) and began selling it in 1967 to hobbyists who wanted recreational rotary-wing flight but didn’t want to go the gyrocopter route with Bensen, Barnett, and other brands, or couldn’t afford a factory-built model. Every part has a unique number to match a step in RotorWay’s notebooks and DVDs.įirst clamoring for notice in brash, optimistic magazine ads of the 1950s (“Easy!” “Fun!” “Anybody who can ride a bicycle can fly this!”), the first viable home helicopter products came from Buford J. This is how RotorWay packages smaller parts like snap rings, pins, nuts, and bolts, which if shipped en masse in plastic bags could wind up in the wrong holes. One big crate stores dozens of lumpy, shrink-wrapped cardboard sheets. Bright, spacious, equipped with workbenches, power tools, and a concrete floor, Harms’ hangar is close to his house: His wife signed off on the project on the condition that he not build it after hours at his auto-body shop-she had the wifely intuition that she might not see him for months of Sundays. The delivery, just eight days after the order had been placed with RotorWay International in Arizona, caught Harms with his hangar incomplete.įour months later, he has finished the hangar, along with much of the aircraft’s frame and cabin. ![]() He called a friend to help hustle them out of traffic. “Not by the road, in the road,” says Harms. The delivery service left them in the nearest open space: the road. In March 2009, Rod Harms’ helicopter-to-be arrived in eight crates stacked outside his ranch-style house near Pekin, Illinois. ![]() Not when the vehicle is a kit-built helicopter. When someone slaps down a hundred grand for a vehicle-a cigarette boat, say, or a sports car-there is usually some kind of red-carpet handover: a hearty handshake along with the keys, then a captain’s cap or a bottle of wine.
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