Bret Ludwig wrote:
Scott wrote:
From your other post to this thread, if you've got all that experience
building production planes, why don't you start your own business and
become a "hired gun" and build homebuilts planes for others who don't
really want to build...


Then I would be running an aircraft factory....albeit a lousy one.

Good aircraft factories build good factory built airplanes, ones
designed for the strengths and such as they are, weaknesses of factory
production, with consistent tooling and the use of people with the
skills earned only in a factory setting. Most homebuilts would be lousy
factory built airplanes and vice versa. That's particularly true of the
Falco, designed to be built in a nation and time of skilled artisans
earning meager pay-most not owning a car-not wealthy rank beginners.

"Driven one rivet, driven them all" is in fact the single goddamned
dumbest thing I have ever heard. And dangerous. You are not an aircraft
worker until you have driven ten or twenty thousand rivets, each
checked by an inspector and the failures flagged (and there will be
some) and you have to stand there hands in pockets watching the other
guy centerpunch, drill out and replace your bad rivet while half the
damn plant is watching you. (Been there done that!) It's better you
drive NO rivets than think you are a riveter with a couple of dozen, or
hundred, under your belt.

I have driven about enough rivets to be dangerous. In a factory
setting I'd be okay after a couple training sessions, but you wouldn't
want me doing and signing off my own work. That's why despite having
the requisite experience I never went for my A&P-I did the written but
not the O&P- I knew some day that damn paper would burn a hole in my
pocket and it would be my ass.

Let RVG get a type certificate, hire experienced aircraft workers and
crank a few thousand out. He'd probably make a lot of money, but it
would interfere with his hobbies, so he won't.


In Rec.aviation.military you say women can't be pilots as good as
men, do you feel the same way about women building aircraft?

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired