Pros / Cons of Homebuilt vs. certified

[rebuttons]

Thanks for your response and indulging the "newbie". My basic thought process is this: I want a 4-place aircraft that is faster than my Six. What I see in common between the RV-10 and Mooney are that both are speedy, 4-place single engine aircraft. Both would be more efficient than the Six. Both would handle my new mission of mainly carrying myself and my wife, but occasionally carrying an additional 2 people. The Six is great for carrying practically anything that we can stuff into it, but I won't need that capability for much longer. What I like about the RV is the short field capability and the efficiency of the fuel burn to speed. I like the fact that I could almost get the performance of a Mooney or Cirrus in an RV-10, but in a more efficient package at a lower cost. In what ways are you thinking the RV and Mooney are such different aircraft - other than one being certified?

Gator,
How tall are you? Or, your wife for that matter? Go climb into a Mooney, a Cessna 400, or any others of interest. If your not sure of your building skills, then try your hand at building a wooden wing and see how it turns out. There are those that the art of building comes more natural than to others. Good luck with your research and hope you decide and do build a showman ship quality aircraft one day,er or should I say some years into the future.

Tejasflyer

[Frank Giger]

What I like about this particular forum is that nobody is cutting down the other airplanes. It is a pet peeve of mine that people talk down about Experimentals and others talk down about spam cans, but in reality, they are different products (and typically with a different mission/purpose) ... and definitely with different owners in a different market. The bottom line is that we need each other; we are not making enough airplanes today, and flying has a bad reputation of being unsafe and only those that are daredevils fly.

Ironically, the prototype spam cans play by EXACTLY the same rules as homebuilts ... and I would like to say that we at Mooney (Chino) right now are having a riot playing in this area with the all-new M10 (sorry, I had to get a plug in there), but we are truly having a lot of fun at work. In fact, with my job, I don't know how I can call it "work" or a "job" ... and they pay me too!!! :o)

I've always thought the whole spam-can training wheels (tricycle) talk was just joshing hangar talk with about as much merit (says the guy building a conventional gear aircraft, of course); when it's time for serious advice it goes away pretty quickly. Aircraft are expensive enough that making a poor choice in fit of aircraft has real impact in whether or not one gets in the plane or not, and it's not easily remedied.

Plus I know very few owners of experimentals that haven't owned a factory job at some point.

[Ron Blum]

I think all of us got our tickets on a certified airplane. A conventional gear airplane by definition is going to be lower drag (the nose wheel isn't in the propeller slip stream), but few people realize how little that difference is/can be. Ironically, the difference in fixed and retractable gear is very, very little today because of better aerodynamics knowledge. The fixed gear is also less complex, lighter and much less expensive to insure. My guess is that Cessna will never build another propeller-driven retract; Cirrus airplanes are fixed gear, too.

Bottom Line: In aviation, there is nothing comparable to the first flight of an airplane whether you built it and/or designed ... experimental or certified (experimental, too :o)