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EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT TAKE TO THE SKIES

By Erin France/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Saturday, October 11, 2008 11:53 PM CDT

It could be just a regular sunny Saturday afternoon neighborhood cookout.

Saturday morning, Roger Smart (left) checks out Frank Hash’s RV plane built with a six-cylinder car engine at the Pine Bluff Municipal Airport. Pine Bluff Commercial/Ralph Fitzgerald

There are more than 40 people wandering around a shaded tent and adjacent building, chatting, laughing and eating burgers.

But this is a fly-in of the Razorback Chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association at Grider Field.

Small, brightly colored airplanes are stationed on Pine Bluff Municipal Airport’s runway and many of the diners are pilots who built those planes.

Take Frank Hash and Sandy Sinclair from El Dorado for example. The pair constructed a sleek orange airplane from a homebuild kit and the engine from a Subaru. “I was four years on the kit,” Hash said. “It was a part-time thing.”

Hash, a former U.S. Army aviator, now owns a plane that can push 180 mph.

These home-built airplanes, known as experimental aircraft, are popular among fly boys and fly girls nationally.

There’s a note of pride in Zack Spivey’s voice when he talks about his white and red beauty taking off. “It’s a wonderful airplane to fly.”

After 10 years of active service in the U.S. Air Force as a navigator, he now works as an engineer and commutes all over the country.

Instead of taking commercial airlines, what he terms “human mailing tubes,” Spivey lands his airplane in work destinations within 750 miles of his Ruston, La., home.

He detailed his takeoff maneuvers, which mirror those of the Blue Angels and laughed. “I’m just a fighter jock,” he said.

Gerald Loyd Dumas organized the event Saturday that attracted about 20 planes from the state, as well as Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi.

His cherry-red aircraft is older than some of the other models. He built it in the 1980s when homebuild kits meant fabrication of the pieces.

“I got a box of sheet metal with all the plans,” he said. “I’d finish a wing and bring it out to the airport.” Four years later, the plane was finished. Now it has over 1,000 hours logged on it and Dumas said he takes his wife, and anyone else interested, for an up-close view of the clouds.

“She’s a good sport,” he said of one passenger. “She hooted and hollered and had a great time.”

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