Question about Christen Eagle/ acro planes

[chacalextreme]

I woul like to start building an acro airplane next year (scratch build, from plans). So I wrote to aviat aircraft asking for the Christen Eagle plans and they told me that they don't sell plans, just the kit... (which is very expensive for my budget... they sent me the price list...) Does anybody knows if I can build this bird from scratch? where I could find the plans? If it is not possible, which two seater with a flat four do you recommend? Maybe a Pitts S2? where to find plans? cost? (scratch build...) I will build the plane with my father, so he deserve a ride on it when ready... the last shot will be a DR107...

Any recomendation?

Thanks!!

[martymayes]

The only way to build a Christen Eagle clone or 2-place Pitts clone would be to reverse engineer one and draw up your own set of plans. There are a number of 2-place plans built airplanes suitable for recreational aerobatics. Since everyone has their favorites, I'll give you mine - Steen Skybolt.

[chacalextreme]

Its a shame don't have the opportunity to build a 2s or a eagle, but the skybolt looks good. I would like to have a IO-360 on it, since it is cheaper to buy and maintain... do you think it will perform good with 180hp and two 150 pounds guys?

Thanks a lot!!

[JimRice85]

I've flown a 180hp Skybolt several hours and thought it performed quite well.

[chacalextreme]

Pretty interesting! I'm going to continue investigating on this plane. Any other suggestion? 2 place acro with 180 hp? could be mono or biplane... hoping to have it ready with 2500-3000 hours in 5 years...

[WLIU]

The important question is what type of acro do you want to fly? And what is your pilot experience?

If you want to doo simple loops and rolls for fun you have a lot more choices than if you want to fly at some level of competition. If you fly loops and rolls to +6G and -3G every week now you will look at different choices than if you have had your hands on the stick and rudder for only a couple of loops and rolls in your entire pilot logbook.

If you have 1,000 tailwheel hours your choices are different than if you have zero tailwheel hours.

The Eagle is a great airplane for someone who wants to bolt together parts and fore go learning to weld, bend wood, and build jigs, figure out systems from scratch, etc. The Eagle comes with the most comprehensive set of manuals ever written for building an airplane.

A skybolt is a great airplane for someone who has all of the skills or seriously wants to learn them. You start by puzzling over blueprints and work up from there.

But what kind of flying are you looking for? There are easier airplanes to fly that you can do the one loop and roll a month in.

Bud Davisson has written great articles about picking an airplane to build. You can find them in the EAA Sport Aviation archives or he has good stuff on his airbum.com web site.

Best of luck,

Wes
N78PS

[FlyingRon]

I've got two neighbors who have/have had acro homebuilts. One had a Starduster and the other now has a RANS.

[Neil]

Lots of discussion of this nature on <BiplaneForum.com> Skybolt, Acro Sport, Starduster and Acro Duster seem to be the primary discussion but there are others. Raven is selling plans for a 2 place I think (not sure) but pretty sure it would use a 540.