June 2024

This month was be a continuation of our streak of having unusual airplanes at our meetings. Erich Shaffer brought his Long-EZ and gave us a bit of history about how Burt Rutan used canards in his aircraft designs. Lots of people showed up.

He had a hard landing in Paso that broke the nose support and Disassembled it to bring it back to SLO for repair. It turns out that Rutan designed the plane to be taken apart and stored in your garage. It was supposed to take 15 minutes, but it took them 5 hours. With practice they could shave a lot of time off.

Afterward we talked about getting Dick Rutan’s LongEZ to Oshkosh for display in their museum. It looks like it can be taken apart and fit into a shipping container. We’ll see if the EAA wants us to ship it. You can see it in the background of the the crowd photos.

The first time I saw one of these I thought that it had a nose-gear collapse on landing, but it turns out that the nose gear retracts and because the engine is in the back it’s much more stable when parking to retract the gear.