I also found that doing the full 40 test hours myself was extremely satisfying.
Being something of a quant, I kept my time occupied running
a full set of test cards and discussing the results with Bud Yerly.
During the 3 year build, I kept flying, trying to maintain 50 hours a year.
I was very grateful to have John Hurst and Jimmy Thursby to fly with in
the factory demonstrators for a few hours and Gary Stout in his beautiful
plane too.
Historically, there have been a few examples of mechanically poor kits,
like the Revolution500, and also some kits requiring better than average
piloting skills to stay alive. The BD5 comes to mind with a first flight
mortality over 50% by most reports. As Fred said most builds now are
kits, and these kits are either matched hole aluminum or molded glass
shapes.
These technologies make it much more difficult to build an A/C seriously
out of rig or out of type spec. Most of the current generation of these
A/C require no special ability to fly well. In my opinion, there is no
reason to not allow these builders to do their own responsible test
program.
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Ira N224XS
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