On 22 Aug 2003 01:23:42 -0700, (Corrie) wrote:

For all the jawing about "information should be free" - and there is
in fact a TON of taxpayer-funded (nothing's free) aeronautical
information available for the downloading from NASA and the dot-gov
sites, including AC 43 and the AIM/FAR - there doesn't seem to be a
single "open source" airplane design. The closest are arguably the
Pietenpol Air Camper, Evans VP-1, and Bowers FlyBaby, but the plans
aren't *free.* Very reasonably priced, but *not* free.

One of the biggest ironies I see in homebuilding are people who are willing
to spend $10,000 or more to build a plane like a Pietenpol, but want to
start by ripping-off the plans vendor for the $50-$100 for the building
instructions.

I have my hopes that some day the Fly Baby will end up public domain.
Still, it does lend itself to some problems. People insist on badly
thought-out modifications, and you'd probably end up with plans sets being
passed around where folks have proudly incorporated their own changes but
unsuspecting builders might think are original. Obviously, an awkward
situation.

One thought was, if the plans went public domain, that they could be
distributed by an official source via web site or CD-ROM. A couple of the
guys on the Fly Baby Yahoo list have experimented with digitizing the
plans. One has run an OCR of the complete plans, but the drawings are
still problematical. Many are full-scale templates, but of course, by the
time the drawings are scanned, converted to JPEGs or GIFs, saved in a
document, and printed from a random computer, the scales have shifted just
enough to make the templates erroneous. Although, after 40 years of
photocopying, the templates are a bit off, anyway....

One niggling problem of the all-electronic approach is that there are still
folks out there who don't mess with computers. They'll want hard-copy
plans, so you're still stuck with dragging a master copy to Kinkos every
once in a while.

Ron Wanttaja