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Why a Sonex? Okay... well this is going to be an interesting page to write, since I originally chose to start building a Mustang-II! To read about my original reasons for choosing the Mustang, see my older Mustang-II site. Basically, everything there still applies, except that I have realised that I need something both simpler and cheaper, if I am to complete it. The Sonex fits the bill. I also feel that the Sonex is a more FUN airplane. It is much cheaper to operate, stalls at a much lower airspeed, seems much more forgiving and is better suited for simple aerobatics. Spins in the Sonex seem quite easy and safe, but for most M-II pilots a spin is a nightmare they never want to experience, and nobody seems to actually know if they will recover from beyond 3 or 4 turns! After having aerobatic training in a Victa Airtourer, and often ending up in a spin after a botched maneuver, I definitely want an airplane with good safe spin characteristics!
I have included below the last entry in my Mustang-II site, which
explains the switch tot he Sonex, and then some excepts from my "Why
a Mustang?" page on the Mustang site which are now relevant to the
Sonex. Note that most of the internal links will be broken
from this site. To follow them you will need to go to the
original
page. DECEASED MUSTANG PROJECT STATUS: December 2004 Crikey! Another half a year has passed already! What have I been doing?? Well... not building my Mustang, it seems. This has been a year of adventure for me, but not all aviation related. Until recently, aside from the Around New Zealand Air-Race back in Easter, I haven't really been involved with aviation at all. However, I've recently got back into things and have been getting some aerobatic training in a Victa Airtourer. This has been heaps of fun and I'm about 3 hours away from being signed off for aerobatics in my logbook. In fact, it's been so much fun that I don't think I can wait to complete the Mustang. I feel like I need a project that has a faster return on investment, in both time and money, than the M-II. This winter just passed I hiked in to Mt.Rufus (in a world-heritage area) to go snowboarding with my brother. After 6 hours of slogging along in snowshoes I was definitely thinking about alternate ways to get to remote places like this. A helicopter seemed like a very good idea! The more I thought about it, the more I decided that a light helicopter would be an ideal aircraft for getting around Tasmania in. Distances aren't very great here, so the lower cruising speed isn't too much of a problem, and much of the terrain is pretty rough. After some (minor) engine hiccups in the NZ air-race, it occurred to me that I would rather have an engine failure in a helicopter than a fixed wing aircraft, over most of the mountainous terrain over there. And Tassie is in many ways like a scaled-down version of New Zealand. So, I began looking at kit helicopters. This was a lot easier than researching fixed-wing kits, because there are a lot less helicopter kits to choose from! Primary candidates were the Masquito M80, the Rotorway Exec162FA and the Helicycle.
The Masquito M80 sounds fantastic. It is lighter
again than the Exec and thus uses a smaller engine. With the same
So. After learning about the M80, the Exec just didn't do it for me anymore. I would rather wait until the M80 is available, if that ever happens. What to do? Should I persevere with the Mustang? Should I give up entirely on kit aircraft and try to buy a completed airplane? But what? What, what, what, should I do? And then, my brother John mentioned that he might be interested in getting his ultralight license, if it would allow him to fly back to King Island. We weren't sure of the regulations about flying over water in Ultralights, so we took a trip out to the local Ultralight training school at Georgetown. It turns out that flying to King Island is definitely possible, and so John is interested. Hmmmm, thinks I. Perhaps John and I could build an ultralight together. Ultralights are simpler, faster and cheaper to build, and operate, and if I could go halves in the costs, and have two people building... it should all happen a lot more quickly. Then I would have something to fly, and I wouldn't mind taking a lot longer to build the Mustang... my "real" aircraft.
True, it isn't as quick as a Mustang, but it's definitely no slouch. It will cruise at 130-150knots (150-170mph, 240-270kmh) and stalls at 35 knots (!!). That's a speed range of more than 4:1!! And it's stressed to +6/-3g, so is as aerobatic as the M-II. It's a simple design, and is built predominantly with blind rivets. From all accounts the kit seems very builder-friendly, with all skins etc. laser cut to the exact size and shape, with all the holes predrilled. It is built from 6061 alloy which is much more corrosion resistant than the Mustang's 2024 material, and they recommend against using any sort of corrosion proofing at all!! How simple can it get? The average build time for the entire aircraft from the kit is 500-700 hours! Given my impatient personality, as a first-time builder, I'm now thinking I picked the wrong aircraft. I don't think the Sonex is an aircraft to fly around the world in, but it certainly seems like an aircraft that would be good to have fun in, while building an aircraft that IS a potential world-rounder. And the Sonex could certainly fly around Australia. To top things off, I have discovered that there are 3 other people in Tasmania building Sonex's, and one here in my hometown of Launceston! I went and visited him last night, and came away very impressed. So that's where my thinking is at the moment. I'm pretty certain that I'm going to shelve the Mustang for the time being, and start on a Sonex, hopefully in conjunction with my brother. It seems a bit sad to end this site here, but hopefully it will only be a lengthy pause, and I'll get back to the Mustang at some later stage in life. When I do, I will most likely go for as many quickbuild options as I can, so for now, my partially completed Mustang-II Centre-Section kit is FOR SALE. The M-II is a great aircraft, and I'm lucky that my dad owns one so I can still get to fly one occasionally, but building one is just too big a job for me at this point in my life. This is not to say I think the Sonex will be easy, just easi-er! I'm not expecting it to simply slot together, but it is definitely a simpler, cheaper aircraft. This is why I originally chose to build a Mustang-II, extracted from my previous website: Continuing on from where I finished off with the About Me page, when I got back home after my trip to King Island I sat down at the computer and began scouring the internet for information on homebuilt aircraft. I already knew of several of the more common ones. In my childhood I had magazine centrefolds of the original Glasairs on my wall alongside the typical Boeing cockpit and F/A-18 posters. I knew a little about the Mustang-II, Thorpe T-18 and also the DR-109 & One Design aircraft. (I had previously been considering building a 1/3 scale electric model of the DR-109). Dad had also mentioned Lancair and RV brands, but I knew virtually nothing about them other than that they were popular mainstream players. The first good site I found was www.homebuilt.org, which has a very large index of links manufacturer's websites. WOOD I don't want to build a wooden airplane. I realise that some extremely high performance aircraft such as the Falco and the DR-109 are wooden, but I just don't like it. I think wood is for houses, furniture and boats. And leaving as trees. Call me prejudiced, but I just don't want to build an airplane out of wood. Wood is expensive. Wood rots. Wood requires gluing. Wood dust clogs up your lungs and gets everywhere. No thanks. Sorry. TUBE & FABRIC To be honest, I didn't even think of this until starting on the "Aluminium" section below. I guess when I was making the decision of what aircraft to build I was really only making the choice between composite and Aluminium. As with wood, there are some very high performance tube and fabric designs out there, but somehow this type of construction doesn't appeal to me. I remember several years ago, flying from Tasmania to King Island with my father in an Auster, watching a part of the left wing fabric flapping around in the breeze. I also feel more confident about riveting than welding. This is personal preference again, but since I'm going to build it I get to choose what it is, don't I? :) COMPOSITES After visiting the Stoddard-Hamilton, Lancair and Tango2 sites, I quickly realised that given my modest financial resources, there was simply no way I could afford any of the composite designs. All the composite aircraft kits are geared toward rapid construction, and by design are delivered with many of the major components largely prefabricated. A consequence of this is that they are approximately double the cost of a standard metal aircraft kit. And with the Glasairs at least, you pay a significant penalty if you buy the individual sub-kits separately. So, putting it into list form, the reasons I chose not to build a composite aircraft were:
Additionally, there are some other reasons that some aircraft builders don't choose composites, although these don't particularly worry me and had no part in my descision making process. Which was totally decided by point (1) above, anyway ;-)
ALUMINIUM So after discounting the composite designs, I was left with Aluminium ones. Now, what did I really want in an airplane?
So I went searching the www.homebuilt.org site for low-wing, 2-seat, Aluminium kit airplanes. And there really weren't that many. At first I didn't look that closely at the Mustang-II, because I knew that Dad's one had taken Brian a long time to build, and had not been an easy project by any stretch of the imagination. As soon as I found the Van's website I had eyes only for the RV series. The website was flash, there were heaps of RV's flying, and it seemed exactly what I was looking for. The kits were very complete and they could be bought in stages. The Van's Aircraft company seemed very solid and honest. They could even supply engines at OEM prices! There was heaps of information about RV's available on the internet, with scores and scores of builder's web-sites. I ordered the RV6 info-pack, video, t-shirt and preview plans within a week, and they arrived promptly. The video was just fantastic, and even Jo was enticed by the lure of freedom and the look of the planes (This was before her big come-around at Mangalore - see Why Fly?). She liked the look of the RV6 the best, so I thought I was on to a good thing :) The RV6 was it. The next major event was going to see one in the flesh. I downloaded the Australian Aircraft Registry from the CASA website and filtered out all the RV's on the Australian register using Microsoft Excel. Jeez there were a lot! Luckily there were a few down here in Tas, and an RV-6A not too far away being built by a Mr. Eddie Austen. I gave Eddie a call, and learned that his plane was having it's first test flight the coming weekend! Understandably he was very busy, and so I made arrangements to visit the following week. Dad happened to be down here at the time, so we were able to fly up to Eddie's in Dad's other plane, a C172. Eddie was very helpful, even offering to lend me many of his tools now that he was finished with them, along with the various jigs required to build the RV-6A. Although Eddie's plane was very nice, somehow I was a little disappointed with the "look" of the -6A up close, when compared against Dad's M-II which I was so familiar with. I think part of it was that being a tri-gear -6A model made it seem much larger than it would have if the tail were on the ground. Other things that I thought looked a bit odd were the very thick wingtip fairings, blunt nose, and the thick fuselage tailcone. None of these things looked "bad"; they just seemed a bit odd looking, probably because of my familiarity with the Mustang. About this time I discovered that the Mustang Aeronautics website which I had found by way of the homebuilt site, was an old, out of date and unused version. The current site is at www.mustangaero.com. The new site has a lot more detailed information about the M-II and the kits that Mustang Aero supply. I did some comparative costing and found there to be negligible price difference between the M-II and RV-6. There is no "finish" kit for the M-II as there is for the RV6, although Mustang Aero can supply the required items separately. MUSTANG-II vs RV6 COST COMPARISON
THE BIG DECISION So it was down to performance and personal preference.
I liked almost everything about the M-II better, except for the stall speed. This had me very worried at first. As a only a student pilot, I didn't have any real experience to draw on. I knew that Dad doesn't really consider his M-II the best short-field aircraft around. But after comparing the quoted figures side by side, watching Rick Henry's mpeg movie of landing-fullstop-takeoff in under 1000ft, the landing & takeoff movies on the Mustang CD, and reconsidering how often I really would be wanting to land on short unsealed airstrips, I decided that this issue alone should not scare me away from the plane my heart wanted to build. Mustang-II stall speed solo 48 knots /
55mph Obviously some rationalisation has gone on in my mind, and I may well have quite a biased view of the "M-II vs RV" issue now that I have committed to the M-II. Despite my personal choice however, I think that the RV series of aircraft will always be more popular than the Mustang. Van's Aircraft is a large, well known company with many existing RV designs to choose among and more on the way. They supply very complete kits, including some very impressive "quickbuild" versions for those with more money than I! Mustang Aeronautics certainly has a task ahead if they wish to gain the same reputation. I do not know if they have any plans for any new aircraft, or a major revision of the current design, now around 30 years old. The design has the potential for many performance enhancing modifications which have been demonstrated by numerous builders over the years. *** 00/12/16 There IS a new Mustang on the way - reportedly a 2-seat tandem sport design with retractable gear and a cruise speed around the 240mph mark *** I am hoping that my Mustang, with one of the new 200hp Jet-A diesel engines capable of maintaining sea-level power to around 15,000ft, coupled with retractable main gear, should achieve a high-altitude cruise speed of around 200kts. Whether this is realistic or not I have yet to discover. |
The Helicycle looks like a great machine (it's even
turbine powered!) and is affordable, but it's only single place.
Besides not being able to carry a passenger, this means I would have
to get my license in a commercial heli such as a Robsinson R22. That
is a very expensive proposition. There is also the "problem" that
the manufacturer won't supply the main rotor bearings until a) you
have a helicopter license, and b) they come and personally check out
your newly built Helicycle, install the bearings and test fly and
rig it for you. I think this is a great safety measure, but it
becomes a problematic when you live on a different land-mass than
the manufacturer.
The Rotorway Exec is by far the most popular kit
helicopter on the market, and with good reason. It looks good, has
had years of development and is pretty much the best 2-place light
helicopter available. I was contemplating selling my partially
completed Mustang kit and buying the first stage kit of the Exec.
However after looking at the Masquito M80 the Exec lost a lot of
it's shine, at least for me.
capacity fuel tank it has a far greater range, a very similar useful
load and higher performance numbers. I think it also looks a lot
better. This helicopter really had my heart racing. I love it. The
big problem is... it isn't available! I gather Masquito ran into
some financial troubles, and then had a falling out with the
brothers who were actually designing the aircraft, and now it's all
on hold. Very frustrating, since a flying prototype does exist!
Along the way Masquito had to design their own engine for the
helicopter and they are now pursuing this development, but initially
for the fixed-wing market. Their engine will compete in the market
with the Jabiru 2200 4-cylinder 80hp engine. More details on the new
engine can be found at their new website called
Then I remembered the