BELFAST – It was a perfect day for flying. Belfast Airport and the Experimental Aircraft Association (EEA), Belfast Chapter 1434 hosted an open house community day and fly in at the airport featuring a host of planes, but centering around home-built models, or RVs as they are called.

Randy Valcik, is one of the local chapter members for EEA. Valcik said his job was to arrange for the RVs to fly in. From Ellsworth he keeps his plane at the Belfast Airport.

Founded in 2006, the EAA is a national organization of people interested in all aspects of flying. They sponsor Young Eagles Flights which provide free aircraft rides for kids age 8 - 17 inclusive, to introduce them to the world of aviation. In addition, they hold seminars, workshops and fly-ins to broaden the publics' knowledge and understanding of the advantages that General Aviation provides to the local community and the nation as a whole.

Valcik explained that the word RV does not stand for the traditional sense of a wheeled vehicle you take on the road.

“It stands for Van’s Air Force,” he said. “For instance, that plane over there is an RV-4, that’s an RV-10 and they are all built by the pilots. A lot of my friends fly RVs, so we had probably 20 planes come in last night and we all enjoyed lobsters.”

“This is a community event to help people know who we are,” he said. “I built my plane in 11 months, it took 805 hours and part of it was even done in my living room. My plane is an RV-12.”

Tim Turner is from Freedom. He explained that homebuilt aircraft are basically kits you can buy of different planes. You can buy the kit or plans and build it from scratch.

“I’m building a Sonex,” explained Tim. “I opted to do a scratch build version where I bought the blueprints and you buy the metal locally and then you bandsaw, tin snip and hand file every single piece.”

That’s the scratch built version. You can also buy a kit where the pieces are all prepunched and you put it together like an erector set, or you can have them build it for you.

“There are multi-stages that you can choose to do,” he said. “You can buy just the tail, or just the wings and work on it as you can afford it. This version I’m building, I’ll probably have close to 3,500 hours in it before I’m done. I’d like to think a little less, but each piece that looks really simple has at least two hours in it.”

You put it together, you inspect it, you take it apart and debur it, you put it back together and you inspect it to make sure you did it right.

“And every now and then you look at it and something is not right, so you take it apart again and redo it,” he said. “Once it’s all done it has to be inspected by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) before we can fly it.”

Peter Webb said his kit plane took six years of work in his spare time.

“I’ve been flying it since 2010 and it has 370 hours on it now,” he said. “These are fun, fast little airplanes. They are fun to fly, they land slow and you can get a lot of thrills out of them.”

Peter Tranchell said his plane took about 2,200 hours to build.

“It took about four and a half years to build,” he said. “The FAA has a rule that says I have to build 51 percent of it. The fuselage was built, the wings were built and then I had to design the electrical system and order an engine to specs. We fly a lot. We were down to Limerick the other day for breakfast and Eastport, we fly a lot.”

Randy Flood is from Castine, but uses the Belfast Airport as his home base.

“My plane is an amphibian, so you can land on water or land,” he said. “These are built in Travaris, Florida which is right outside of Orlando. And it’s a lot of fun to fly. It’s the most fun you can ever have.”

Eye catching for the plane is the pirate emblem painted on the tail.

“I’m a ship’s pilot as a living,” he explained. “I’ve often been called a pirate so it’s a homage to my profession.”

You scan check out EEA’s Facebook page for more information.

 https://www.facebook.com/EAA-1434-Belfast-ME-1629170564035243/