Story highlights
America's biggest airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, hosts crazy home-built airplanes
Some look like flying motorcycles or even spaceships
Would you like to ride a “motorcycle in the sky”? That’s how one pilot describes an experimental plane he built himself.
How does a cross-country flight in the Quickie Q-200 sound? That plane looks like something from the future – but it was built by a pilot from a kit he ordered in the mail more than 30 years ago.
Pilots who build their own planes are the heart and soul of America’s biggest aviation celebration going on this week in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Culturally, the idea of building or designing your own airplane speaks to the fierce independent spirit that has contributed so much to the aviation world since the pioneering days of the early 1900s.
These two aviators have taken do-it-yourself projects to cruising altitude.
How about a Quickie?
When Sam Hoskins of Carbondale, Illinois, was looking for a plane kit to build at home in 1981, he picked the Quickie Q-200.
But the project didn’t exactly live up to its name, at first. It would be five years before Hoskins would finish building the plane and fly it for the first time.
When he rolled it out, he had a machine that was lean and mean – a single seat for the pilot and a fast engine.
Hoskins named his airplane “Plastic Explosive,” as a tip of the hat to his past life in the commercial explosives-making business.
And the plane started living up to its name.
“In 1999, I flew it coast-to-coast in one day, from Los Angeles to the Outer Banks – 16 hours of flight time – and that’s before I had fuel injection,” he said.
Oshkosh's crazy, cool, innovative airplanes
But the plane’s real attention-getter is its wings.
The Q-200 has two sets of wings. The wings toward the front – called canards – also include the plane’s landing gear. “There aren’t any other airplanes around that you will see in that configuration,” he said.
Another thing that’s pretty unusual about this plane: no horizontal stabilizer on the tail.
“It’s the kind of plane that people will come by and they’ll point to it and stand next to it and say, ‘What is this?’”
“People confuse this plane with another aircraft called the Dragonfly, but that’s a completely different airplane,” Hoskins said.
There were about 900 kits released of the Quickie Q-200, he said. “There’s probably less than 20 of them flying today.”
‘Motorcycle in the sky’
Pilot Matt Tisdale has always been fascinated with flight.
“When I was a kid, my mom said I always used to chase down birds and try to catch them and figure out how they flew,” he said.
“I always looked up and wanted to be there.”
Tisdale finds himself up there quite a bit these days. This week, he spent a lot of time flying in an experimental twin-engine, propeller airplane called an AirCam that he finished building from a kit this year.
AirCam was originally developed as a platform for aerial camera work. And when you first see what it looks like – you understand. “You’re flying completely exposed,” said Tisdale.
Currently only about 200 AirCams have been manufactured and are flying, according to the plane’s website.
Tisdale has heard family stories about how his grandfather learned to fly long ago as a member of a flying circus. Maybe Tisdale inherited his grandfather’s love for flying low and slow.
He said he flew the AirCam to Oshkosh for more than 11 hours from his home in Greenville, South Carolina. Cruise speed: 50-100 mph, at an altitude of only about 200 feet above the trees.
With AirCam, “it’s like you’re standing on top of a building and looking over the edge,” he said.
It’s “like riding a motorcycle in the sky.”