There is a wide range of accepted handling characteristics among factory built airplanes, and the range is wider still for homebuilts. I continue to marvel at the range of homebuilt handling characteristics, the subtleties, the nuances, the quirks, and the gotchas. The truth of the matter is, homebuilt owner/builder/buyer/pilots are terrible consumers -- we take what’s there, we don’t ask the right questions, we adapt where we have to, we make excuses for the manufacturer, and sometimes we die in the effort.

My personal flight records show 120 kinds of aircraft flown, more than two dozen of those being homebuilts. How many of those have, say, been spin tested? Not all of them!

Well, gee, you say, nobody with any skill is going to accidentally spin something like, say, a Whizbang 2000. That’s a really fast, really high wing loading rocket that only the big buck boys will play with, and they all know how to avoid a spin. Well, maybe they do know how to avoid a spin, but what happens some day in a slightly tight turn to final with a tired pilot in gusty conditions? Is there adequate stall warning and adequate control authority? Is the design so highly tuned that an imprecise customer airplane will not have the safety margin that the factory (hopefully) demonstrated? Is any of this documented somewhere in some standard way so that anybody can find out what’s been tested, what hasn’t, and what the results were?

How do you really know what you're getting if you can’t get a full envelope checkout, or if you’re a prospect?

Homebuilders have tremendous freedoms in this country, freedoms to allow the individual to experiment, to tinker, to try, to do new things. This is in the best traditions of our country. It’s one thing, however, for an individual to try things (build and fly their own design), then another thing for somebody else to want to repeat the experiment (by buying plans), but quite something else for a manufacturer to offer kits and quickbuilds, do slick advertising, have booths at airshows and all that as a way of pursuing business without bothering with the niceties of acceptable handling characteristics or consumer safety or even full disclosure.

But then, suppose a customer takes a standard design and just has to improve on it a little bit, in that best tradition, and they booger the design and screw the safety margins. Is that caveat emptor or the kit vendor’s responsibility? We’d probably all agree on the former, but the kit builder will still take a publicity hit.

Or suppose the airplane is an entry level plane, not advertised as aerobatic, just a here to there machine. What implicit promise is there, not in a legal sense, but an expectation in the mind of the owner/builder/buyer/pilot, that the airplane will be as safe as a Cherokee or a 172? The mission is the same. The engine is the same. The wife and family are the same. The expectation is the same. The demonstrated safety is not.

Or suppose the airplane is not really aerobatic, and not suited to aerobatics, but, due to marketing pressure, they toss in a video clip of the plane doing a roll. Sure, there may be a disclaimer somewhere, but does that set customer expectations properly?

Or consider, how many of the cross country cruisers are really good for IFR? Then again, how many spam cans are really good for IFR? Fuel imbalance, out of rig airplanes, crappy instruments, bad response to turbulence, lots of spam cans aren’t so great, either. Supposedly, a NASA report on general aviation handling qualities some years ago had some uncomplimentary things to say about general aviation handling qualities for single pilot IFR in turbulence.

Maybe we need a report card for homebuilt handling characteristics, to let the prospect know what they’re getting into. This is not a catalog of aircraft, it is a standardized documentation of how aircraft have been tested. The report card has two parts: to tell how the airplane (at least the test specimen) really handles; and to document and standardize whatever formal testing may have been done.

The gotcha is that the report card has to be repeatable from evaluator to evaluator and from customer to customer and from airplane to airplane, so that anybody can do the tests and everybody will get the same results. Any third party should be able to duplicate factory results. This means quantitative, not qualitative. It also means that the report has to be written in homebuilder-ese, not test pilot-ese.

These tests should be simple enough that they can be completed in a reasonable time, such as three hours. The tests should be done in light chop and a crosswind, not in smooth air, for full disclosure.

What things go into a report card? Some of the simple ones would be: