When a Dream Goes Bad – Musings

This all started with a Facebook post. I’m in a few experimental aircraft enthusiast-type groups, and in one of them, someone posted a question: has anyone ever built a Long-Eze powered by a jet engine? 

Now I knew that the answer was yes, because I was certain I’d read an article about a build of this sort. A short bit of searching later turned up a pair of in depth Kitplanes articles (Part 1, Part 2) that I’d vaguely recalled from memory. Unfortunately, the same search turned up several articles on the fatal final flight of the same aircraft, only a year after the build articles had been published. 

To be clear, I don’t intend to cast aspersions on anyone, living or dead, with this post. This is more to get some thoughts out of my head and onto paper, especially since it’s my long-term goal to set out on my own plans-building journey within the next few years. There are a few things about this story that send uncomfortable shivers down my spine when I think about them. 

This was not the first project for this builder, or anyone involved in the project. By his own account, he’d previously built at least three other aircraft, at least two with very similar construction. Likewise, the technical help he received was from people who very much knew what they were doing. Hundreds of hours of experienced effort went into each design modification to make this jet fly well, and look fantastic. 

But disaster was only a matter of time. The aircraft was doomed before the engine was ever installed. According to the NTSB investigation, they found that the left wing (the initial point of failure for the crash) had sections of dry fiber weave where the resin had failed to fully penetrate the glass fiber fabric. This meant that the wing was insufficiently strong, and failure was inevitable given enough time in the air. That the inevitable happened where it did, with the debris coming to rest in a field is something of a mercy. Only the pilot died, and at 200 knots and 200 feet, he likely didn’t have much time to contemplate what was coming. 

Here’s the part that scares me (and that I should maybe print out and put up on my workshop wall when I get started on my build): composite layup isn’t a fast process. The wing spar that didn’t cure right, someone, possibly multiple someones, had to walk by, look at, and go “No, that’ll be fine.” Or maybe he looked at it one evening at the end of build day and thought “that’s not right, I’ll have to fix that tomorrow.” and then moved on to other tasks and never thought about it again. Maybe he was just thinking a few steps ahead about the next design modification. Maybe a similar mistake on a normal Long-Eze type build, where the airframe isn’t subject to quite so much stress wouldn’t have failed so catastrophically. We’ll never know. 

Which, if there’s a cautionary lesson there for me when I start building, it’s to proceed with the kind of plodding, methodical energy that I put into marathon training. I know that I can get a few steps ahead of myself. I can get impatient, distracted, and as The Lovely and Gracious Mrs. will attest, I’m not so much a perfectionist as I am an imperfectionist. “Just ship it” as we say in non-mission critical software development. I certainly don’t have this guy’s experience (although I will be finding some experts for guidance). 

Aviation as a whole tends to harshly punish mistakes. If I’m not ready for that, maybe I should reconsider this build before it begins. But as I’m reminded with every marathon training evolution and race, you only get so many trips around the sun, and none of us know when the last time is going to be. I fully plan on living to 105 so that I can finish playing through my Steam backlog, but if I have to go out chasing my dreams, then so be it. Better that than to never try.