WEBVTT 00:05.540 --> 00:12.280 Hi there, welcome to my talk, Experimental Aviation Risks and Reward for the Aerospace Village DEFCON 28 Safe Mode. 00:12.400 --> 00:17.060 I decided to do this talk with a little bit lighter content than the stuff I did last year. 00:17.060 --> 00:26.460 Since those of us involved in security and variably are also involved with risk, I thought it would be interesting to kind of apply the risk model to some different perspectives. 00:26.460 --> 00:48.780 Since I'm building my own aircraft, I'll talk about some of the things that I learned, some of the decisions that you will have to undergo if you decide to actually get involved with building your own aircraft, and hopefully give you a new perspective on this particular segment of DII and being a maker of building your own airplane. 00:52.200 --> 00:54.480 So, again, my name is Patrick Kiley. 00:54.480 --> 00:57.680 I'm a member of the Penetration Testing Team at Rapid7. 00:57.780 --> 01:02.660 Previously, I've done research last year on avionic security. 01:02.720 --> 01:12.140 There's a talk that you can look up for last year's Aviation Village, before it became this year's Aerospace Village, where I talked about CAN bus and avionics. 01:12.380 --> 01:17.180 I've also done other research in internet-connected transportation platforms. 01:17.520 --> 01:24.120 I have experience in hardware hacking, Internet of Things, CAN bus quite a bit, and I'm building my own airplane. 01:25.920 --> 01:28.640 So here's kind of a quick overview of the agenda. 01:28.640 --> 01:34.360 We're going to talk about the FAA regulations very lightly and specifically this 51% rule. 01:34.400 --> 01:38.440 We'll talk about plans and kits, a little bit on quick builds as well. 01:38.880 --> 01:46.440 Composite versus riveted aluminum construction, you know, just kind of the construction materials that you can choose to build your airframe out of. 01:47.540 --> 01:57.800 A little treatise on making changes to tested designs, talk about engine selection, avionics, and then a little bit about the final steps after you've completed. 02:01.670 --> 02:08.490 So the FAA defines the language for what is permitted if you're going to build your own airplane. 02:08.490 --> 02:18.950 So certified aircraft have a ridiculous amount of regulations they have to comply with for safety to ensure, you know, consistency and everything else. 02:18.950 --> 02:22.350 And it's one of the reasons that makes certified aircraft so expensive. 02:23.770 --> 02:30.830 Experimental aircraft are not cheap by any means whatsoever, but they are a little bit more advantageous. 02:30.950 --> 02:48.010 The FAA defines the rules and federal aviation regulations 21.121 section G, and then they've got an advisory circulator that they did 20-27 where they clarify some additional stuff because of what some of the other manufacturers are starting to do. 02:48.490 --> 02:55.770 The biggest thing is you need to have proof, you know, you need proof that you actually, this was built by a person and not a company . 02:55.770 --> 03:07.030 So this is basically be taking pictures of your work, keeping a blog, keeping other records showing that you bought the components, that you put them together, something showing your progress. 03:07.290 --> 03:08.850 The work can be started by someone else. 03:08.850 --> 03:13.970 You can actually buy somebody else's amateur built kit and finish it yourself. 03:13.970 --> 03:26.190 Of course, you know, cabbie and emptor, you don't know what their skill set is, so you need to have someone who knows to kind of help review it and be able to actually examine the work up till then and see if it's sound. 03:26.910 --> 03:28.450 And then you can also have help. 03:28.450 --> 03:29.550 That's how quick builds work. 03:29.550 --> 03:40.210 There are a lot of programs where you can actually go to a factory and do most of the work and then you just have the instructors there to guide you so you actually comply with that 51% rule. 03:41.550 --> 03:43.210 A repairman's certificate is a little bit different. 03:43.210 --> 03:46.450 A repairman's certificate basically allows you to work on it after it's done. 03:46.630 --> 03:53.330 So, for example, you can work on the engine more and wouldn't have to hire an airframe and power plant mechanic. 03:53.330 --> 03:58.770 You can demonstrate you have the skill to do the work safely and successfully. 03:58.870 --> 04:00.610 That's what a repairman's certificate is. 04:00.610 --> 04:07.230 It's separate from the airworthiness certificate and it's a demonstration of the skill, not a demonstration of the work. 04:07.610 --> 04:12.230 And experimental aircraft have restrictions that don't apply to commercial aircraft. 04:12.230 --> 04:16.610 You cannot use an experimental aircraft in a for hire manner. 04:16.670 --> 04:21.710 But if you're just moving yourself and your family around and you're not charging for it, you're allowed to do that. 04:21.710 --> 04:27.210 You can basically use it for pleasure all pretty much within the limitations. 04:27.210 --> 04:38.190 When you get the airworthiness certificate, your airworthiness certificate is going to have its own set of limitations in it and it's going to be very clearly defined as to what you're not allowed to do with it. 04:38.410 --> 04:47.810 Beyond that, the topic is very complicated and I would just encourage you to do the research if you want to use an experimental aircraft in a particular manner. 04:48.050 --> 04:54.870 There's going to be someone who has actually tried and done it and the answer is going to be out there for you on the internet. 04:56.010 --> 04:59.310 So, why would you want to choose an experimental aircraft ? 04:59.570 --> 05:01.250 It can't be just because you want to fly. 05:01.250 --> 05:03.250 If you want to fly, you should just rent. 05:03.250 --> 05:06.290 There are many things in life that you should rent and not own. 05:06.610 --> 05:16.690 Aircraft is probably one of them, but if you want to fly something that's a little bit more higher performance and you're an engineering nut and like to build stuff, this might just be for you. 05:16.890 --> 05:19.570 You have to be able to tolerate a certain amount of risk. 05:19.750 --> 05:30.690 Building something that's normally done by professionals automatically inherits a specific amount of risk and you have to be willing to analyze that, see what it is, accept it. 05:30.910 --> 05:38.290 It's going to be probably the most complicated thing you've ever done because you're not just doing the airframe, you're doing the avionics, you're doing the engine. 05:38.670 --> 05:46.990 It's a lot of different disciplines mixed in together, but you can get a higher performance aircraft than you would be able to get for a specific dollar amount. 05:47.150 --> 05:51.790 The image that I have here of the Long Easy, it's a very high performing aircraft. 05:51.970 --> 05:53.870 It's also very reasonably priced. 05:53.870 --> 05:55.310 It's a two-seater tandem. 05:56.250 --> 06:04.970 One of my favorites is you'll kind of see later when you actually see that the kit that I chose to build, it's a very solid choice for an experimental aircraft. 06:06.210 --> 06:08.390 So how are you going to build it? 06:08.390 --> 06:10.090 There are a few different ways you can go about this. 06:10.090 --> 06:11.710 You can buy a set of plans. 06:11.710 --> 06:13.890 I actually have a set of plans here for my kit. 06:13.890 --> 06:15.990 This is a set of Cozy Plans. 06:15.990 --> 06:24.330 It's a very thick, bound, large bound manual that also comes with some very large format drawings. 06:24.610 --> 06:28.990 So this is some drawings of the instrument panel using conventional gauges. 06:29.490 --> 06:35.330 And then, you know, that's just one section or two sections of the plans that actually cover the whole thing. 06:35.930 --> 06:40.810 The other thing that you can do, and when you buy plans, you actually just source everything. 06:40.810 --> 06:43.370 You're going to buy all the components. 06:43.370 --> 06:48.410 For example, this one, it's going to be all the fiberglass, all the epoxy, all the individual metal components. 06:48.410 --> 06:55.270 You're going to buy the engine, the airframe, the avionics, and you're going to build the airframe from scratch using just plans. 06:55.570 --> 06:57.210 It's the least expensive option. 06:57.210 --> 06:58.690 It's also the most time consuming. 06:59.490 --> 07:06.950 The way kits work is you purchase the plans and partially completed parts, enough to qualify for the 51% rule. 07:06.950 --> 07:15.230 They have some quick builds where a lot of the stuff is done for you, but you still have to finish it, and it greatly decreases the amount of time that you spend on it. 07:15.230 --> 07:18.330 But you also increase the cost. 07:18.330 --> 07:21.430 The picture I have here is actually from Sun and Fun 2017. 07:21.470 --> 07:22.910 It's a Velocity Twin. 07:22.910 --> 07:33.370 It's a gorgeous aircraft, very high performing, beautiful inside, canard design, which you can kind of see my preference towards those already. 07:33.610 --> 07:44.770 And then there's another thing called builder assistance programs, where you actually go to the manufacturer and they help you along the way, but ensure that you're actually doing enough to qualify for 51% of the work. 07:47.450 --> 07:48.670 And then there's different materials. 07:48.670 --> 07:57.990 So if you're going to build an aircraft, if you want just something low and slow, or maybe a small and single seat airbag, the Fabric Overwood is perfectly valid. 07:58.130 --> 07:59.870 The very first aircraft were made from these. 07:59.870 --> 08:08.770 You might have some just aluminum tubes, aluminum spars, and the rest of it's going to be wood. 08:09.390 --> 08:11.270 It also can be very lightweight. 08:11.770 --> 08:13.870 And then you cover that with a doped fabric. 08:13.870 --> 08:23.770 It's a special type of fabric that's coated in epoxy to make it very rigid, relatively easy compared to the other techniques, inexpensive. 08:23.970 --> 08:26.250 This was just a gorgeous one that I saw at Sun and Fun. 08:26.250 --> 08:30.410 I'm not even sure if it's fabric covered, but it's the type of aircraft that you'll see. 08:31.690 --> 08:36.890 Probably the most popular style out there, the one that has the most examples flying, is riveted aluminum. 08:36.890 --> 08:44.570 The Vans RV line of aircraft are all riveted aluminum, maybe with some composite components that you add here and there. 08:45.550 --> 08:50.570 And that's how, for the majority of aircraft history, aircraft were built. 08:50.570 --> 08:53.930 It was aluminum that was all held together by rivets. 08:54.250 --> 09:00.290 You have to be comfortable banging rivets, working with blind rivets, but it's very strong and light. 09:01.030 --> 09:10.850 It was only recently that aircraft construction moved towards composite, but you'll still see a lot of riveted construction out there for existing airframes. 09:11.330 --> 09:13.650 And now we get to my favorite composite. 09:13.690 --> 09:20.270 So this is what I chose, fiberglass and epoxy, or carbon fiber and epoxy. 09:20.270 --> 09:24.050 You can see a beautiful carbon fiber airfoil here. 09:26.210 --> 09:27.590 What is composite? 09:27.590 --> 09:34.670 So really, anytime you combine two materials, and when those two materials are combined, they form a stronger material, you get a composite. 09:34.690 --> 09:40.930 Concrete is a composite material because you have your aggregate, your sand, and your cement, and you get concrete. 09:40.930 --> 09:47.390 Sometimes, you know, with your reinforcing structures like rebar or other structures added to it, but it's still a composite. 09:47.810 --> 09:50.490 So fiberglass by itself is not a composite. 09:50.490 --> 09:54.090 Fiberglass, when it's bonded with epoxy, is a composite. 09:54.090 --> 10:05.490 Carbon fiber and Kevlar, not the bulletproof Kevlar, but an abrasion-resistant Kevlar, are also a couple of other fabric materials that can be used in composite construction. 10:06.090 --> 10:10.990 In fact, newer aircraft like the Dreamliners, all composite construction. 10:12.450 --> 10:20.030 777X uses composite wings and then conventionally fabricated fuselage. 10:21.370 --> 10:27.130 So what I chose, the Burt Rutan design, this is a little bit about those, my favorites. 10:27.450 --> 10:30.210 He pioneered moldless composite construction. 10:30.210 --> 10:35.650 So it's a method of fabricating fiberglass parts without a mold. 10:36.210 --> 10:41.690 You take a section of foam, and I have an example right here. 10:41.990 --> 10:47.590 So for this image, this is a section that was actually removed from the aircraft in a building. 10:47.590 --> 11:07.070 You can see you have your fiberglass and epoxy layer, but beyond it you have sandwiched types of foam and they're held together with micro bubbles mixed in with epoxy to bond both the fiberglass to the first layer of foam and then the second layer of foam together. 11:07.070 --> 11:10.890 And what you do is on this other side, you're eventually going to get foam on this. 11:10.890 --> 11:12.790 Not for this, this is a discard piece. 11:13.670 --> 11:21.190 And between the two, by having this space separated by the two separate skins of fiberglass, you get much stronger construction. 11:21.510 --> 11:29.150 And you can basically take those shapes, you can lay them out, and then you lay the fiberglass on top of it into its final design. 11:29.310 --> 11:36.570 That was what Burt Rutan successfully did in his very easy and his long easy, and he turned that into scaled composites. 11:36.670 --> 11:39.410 And it now is going into space with that design. 11:39.410 --> 11:47.570 He just did Voyager, the aircraft that flew around the world without stopping, and many of his other brilliant designs. 11:47.570 --> 11:49.610 He was a big advocate of the canard. 11:49.610 --> 11:57.490 I think some of the the work has gone away from that, but I'll kind of go into what a canard is in the next slide. 11:57.490 --> 12:00.430 But most of his designs were canard based. 12:00.510 --> 12:02.390 Canards are very resistant to stalls. 12:02.390 --> 12:10.550 You still have to follow weight and balance, and you always have to ensure that it's far enough forward so that the canard stalls first. 12:10.550 --> 12:15.870 But a canard adds from lift instead of subtracting from it, as I'll kind of show you in the next image. 12:15.870 --> 12:17.370 This is all from Bold Method. 12:17.850 --> 12:21.590 In a canard designed aircraft, the canard always must stall first. 12:21.590 --> 12:31.410 If the main wing stalls first, you're going to enter into a situation called a deep stall, but it's a relatively easy thing to avoid as long as you follow weight and balance, which you're supposed to do every time you fly anyway. 12:31.830 --> 12:33.670 You'll never get into that situation. 12:34.130 --> 12:44.930 So a traditional, conventionally designed aircraft, you have your horizontal stabilizer that provides a vector of force opposite that of the wing. 12:44.930 --> 12:54.890 So it's providing, in this image, 250 pounds of negative lift that counteracts the 2250 pounds of positive lift. 12:55.870 --> 13:01.010 And then in a neutral situation, you have 2000 pounds of weight, you know, in this particular configuration. 13:01.030 --> 13:06.450 In a canard, the idea is that it's more efficient because both surfaces are providing lift. 13:06.450 --> 13:13.810 Both surfaces are providing a positive amount of lift to counteract the weight of the aircraft. 13:16.170 --> 13:27.210 Again, all this composite picture of the skin I just showed you, where you basically have a very thin layer of fiberglass embedded with epoxy. 13:27.530 --> 13:30.730 It's actually a very friendly method to get into. 13:31.270 --> 13:38.490 Both the aluminum and the epoxy kits, they have what are called kind of like builder's confidence kits. 13:38.490 --> 13:45.470 You're like, I'm not going to spend $10,000 on a set of components just to see that this is really not for me. 13:45.470 --> 13:52.810 So you can spend just a little bit and they'll give you some epoxy, some fiberglass, and some foam and you do it. 13:52.810 --> 13:58.810 You actually go through several steps to show that this is actually something that you're capable of. 13:59.010 --> 14:10.990 In this other image, we actually have a canard style wing that's for a COSY that's actually up on a jig before it has the fiberglass applied to it. 14:14.270 --> 14:20.830 So this is where I got into the selection for the plans that I eventually chose. 14:21.170 --> 14:27.770 So Bert Rutan designed the very easy and then he does design the long easy as a ground-up redesign of that. 14:27.770 --> 14:30.550 Long easy is a two-seat tandem aircraft. 14:30.750 --> 14:34.850 These pictures are from Sun and Fun 2017 when I took them. 14:35.410 --> 14:40.650 And then the picture you see here is that of an air canard that's still in partial primer. 14:41.130 --> 14:45.450 I was really interested in this one because it's the design that I originally chose to go with. 14:45.470 --> 14:51.650 And eventually I actually licensed the set of COSY plans as well because I just wanted to make sure everything was covered. 14:51.650 --> 15:00.630 There was some disagreement between Nat Puffer and the guy that designed the air canard, which is a slightly roomier version of the COSY. 15:00.630 --> 15:08.530 So just to avoid any possible issues in design, I wanted to have both set of plans because they're reasonably inexpensive. 15:08.750 --> 15:14.650 And I could actually decide that if something didn't give me a clear image, I figured the other set of plans would. 15:18.380 --> 15:21.620 So here's the little blurb about making changes. 15:21.620 --> 15:31.720 One of the biggest things I learned about from just looking in the forums, talking to people, is that any changes that you want to make can have unintended consequences. 15:32.200 --> 15:39.340 One of the earliest things I learned is like, you know, why wouldn't you not take the fiberglass and use carbon fiber? 15:39.340 --> 15:41.020 It's reasonably cheap now. 15:41.160 --> 15:48.760 Well, you're really not going to save a whole lot of weight, but you are going to introduce completely different moments of elasticity. 15:49.340 --> 15:58.440 You could actually add some vibration elements that could cause something to shear and cause something to fail and not anticipate it. 16:00.100 --> 16:09.680 The other big line that I heard was basically, you know, from your aircrafts actually end up being lighter because you're not going to be able to afford any avionics to put in it for after all the money you spent on the carbon fiber. 16:09.680 --> 16:11.760 So you'll end up with a lighter aircraft that way. 16:14.380 --> 16:20.540 It's pretty interesting when you actually dig into it and see that, you know, maybe not carbon fiber is the best choice for all aircraft. 16:20.540 --> 16:23.280 There are aircraft that were designed around carbon fiber. 16:23.280 --> 16:35.300 The Burkut, which is a fast and slick version of the Long EZ, is a carbon fiber variant, but it was designed from the ground up to have the amount of carbon fiber necessary that it has for it. 16:36.180 --> 16:38.620 And then this is kind of a famous line from a plan. 16:38.620 --> 16:42.000 If you want to put something in your airplane, first throw it up in the air. 16:42.000 --> 16:43.860 If it comes down, it doesn't belong in the airplane. 16:44.060 --> 16:47.540 The designer of this was very minimalist in what he designed. 16:47.540 --> 16:50.060 He wanted this aircraft to go without a battery. 16:50.640 --> 16:53.840 He wanted to go without a starter using just a prop start. 16:53.860 --> 16:56.000 Most people have chosen not to do that. 16:56.920 --> 17:02.120 There are other issues and risks when you deal with hand cranking a prop. 17:02.820 --> 17:12.720 You know, all it takes is a little slip of the foot and now all of a sudden you're, you know, like the bad guy in Indiana Jones with a big fat spinning piece of metal right in your face. 17:12.880 --> 17:14.700 So, no thank you. 17:14.700 --> 17:17.740 I'll pay the weight penalty and deal with the starter. 17:17.740 --> 17:21.260 And then with glass panel cockpits, you need to have a backup battery source. 17:21.260 --> 17:22.600 You need to have a power source. 17:22.820 --> 17:24.780 And if you're going to have a starter, you have to have a battery. 17:25.200 --> 17:31.020 But it just goes to show that, you know, you really need to be careful when you're actually considering making changes. 17:31.280 --> 17:32.520 Is this going to add weight? 17:32.520 --> 17:34.180 Is this going to change the wing loading? 17:34.180 --> 17:37.600 Is this going to significantly change the performance characteristics of the aircraft? 17:37.860 --> 17:41.660 And here's really a case study in this next example. 17:41.980 --> 17:46.260 The unfortunate accident that took John Denver's life. 17:46.260 --> 17:48.640 John Denver was flying along easy. 17:48.660 --> 18:12.160 The NTSB actually found that the probable cause of that accident was the designer decided to take the fuel selector valve and instead of it being in front in the area where it's easily reachable by the pilot, he relocated the fuel valve to be closer to the fuel source. 18:12.460 --> 18:20.740 But what that actually did is when you actually have to select it, you have to reach over your shoulder because of the, you know, just you're kind of confined in. 18:20.740 --> 18:24.360 So you actually have to do this maneuver to change the fuel valve. 18:24.360 --> 18:37.160 And then when he was doing that, they say he probably unintentionally put control pressure on the rudder, causing a loss of control, causing him to fly into Monterey Bay, taking his life. 18:37.300 --> 18:44.740 So just the thought, the designer, it's thought relocated the fuel valve to make the fuel line shorter. 18:44.740 --> 18:53.700 By having shorter fuel lines, there could be less risk of a fuel leak, but introduced other elements that were not necessarily reconsidered from the fuel valve being up front. 18:53.700 --> 18:58.600 So in a long easy, the fuel tanks are behind you, the engine is behind you. 18:58.600 --> 19:02.200 So the thought was let's put the fuel selector behind you as well. 19:02.220 --> 19:04.000 Maybe not the best idea. 19:04.000 --> 19:17.760 It's a perfect example of the unintended consequences that you can have from actually making changes and why you really need to take a risk-based approach to any possible changes than what the designers actually intended on this. 19:17.760 --> 19:21.160 Because an experimental aircraft is inherently a risky activity. 19:23.060 --> 19:25.640 That was a little section about engine selection. 19:25.640 --> 19:39.220 So when I was getting into this, I was debating did I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an engine that was effectively a 50-year-old design? 19:39.220 --> 19:40.220 And that's what they all are. 19:40.220 --> 19:45.360 All of the air-cooled engines out there are really based on old, old technology. 19:45.360 --> 19:46.020 Pardon me. 19:49.040 --> 19:51.140 But they're designed for the purpose where they're used. 19:51.580 --> 20:06.540 But the thing I quickly learned is that the problem you run into with automotive conversions is, and the Subaru is a big popular one because it's kind of the same horizontally flat plane opposed engine, you have all the cooling issues. 20:06.540 --> 20:10.460 You have to introduce some type of cooling system, now you have a radiator, you have additional weight. 20:10.560 --> 20:19.680 You have to put in a reducing gearbox to slow the engine speed down to the appropriate speed for a propeller. 20:20.040 --> 20:24.300 That adds additional weight, adds additional complexity, additional points of failure. 20:24.900 --> 20:27.100 And then you have to deal with the fuel injection system. 20:27.100 --> 20:32.660 A fuel injection system that if you're using the automotive ECU, you may end up going to limp mode. 20:32.680 --> 20:35.500 And when you're in a car, you can just pull over. 20:35.600 --> 20:39.000 In an aircraft, you have to find a place to land immediately if you lose power. 20:39.040 --> 20:42.920 It can introduce an element of danger that's unexpected. 20:42.920 --> 20:45.760 And what I discovered is they ended up not being cheaper. 20:45.760 --> 20:51.640 They ended up being heavier, more complicated, more prone to more things that can go wrong. 20:52.200 --> 20:55.900 And because of all the changes you have to make there, they end up not being any cheaper. 20:56.520 --> 20:58.980 So that leaves us with conventional engines. 20:58.980 --> 21:04.960 Okay, you can do a turbine, but if you have that kind of money, you're going to be getting a super high performance something anyway. 21:05.400 --> 21:11.320 So conventional engines, they are lightweight, they're expensive for what you get. 21:11.320 --> 21:16.860 They are just look up IO 360 new and you'll see what I mean. 21:17.000 --> 21:24.600 Not to mention things like an IO 540 or IO 540 turbo, you know, turbo normalized or, you know, some of the other fancier ones. 21:24.600 --> 21:28.740 And imagine if you had an aircraft that had two of these, which you'd have to pay for to replace them in. 21:30.740 --> 21:32.860 So there are experimental options. 21:32.860 --> 21:41.720 What that basically means, it hasn't gone through the exact same certification process because the certification process itself is expensive, but yet you get the same quality. 21:41.720 --> 21:56.880 So you can get an experimental version of these engines that have the same quality for a much more reasonable price than buying something else that would be kind of in the certificated realm. 21:58.100 --> 22:00.900 All right, avionics, one of my favorite subjects. 22:01.640 --> 22:08.900 So when most of these designs came out, all you had choices were like, you know, your little round steam gauges, as they call them. 22:09.160 --> 22:24.400 You have your individual airspeed indicator, your horizontal situation indicator, you know, your compass, your turn and slip, vertical speed, altimeter, all of your, you know, attitude indicator, all separate designs. 22:25.020 --> 22:33.580 In a glass panel, you combine all that with a moving map, with GPS, all your controls in a centralized point, but you're also introducing a central point of failure. 22:33.580 --> 22:36.800 So you need to have some additional plans for that. 22:37.220 --> 22:41.480 But glass panel avionics are getting cheaper all the time. 22:41.480 --> 22:46.960 They're some of my favorite things to mess with for those of you who've studied the previous research that I've done. 22:47.240 --> 22:48.420 I think they're safer. 22:48.420 --> 22:50.860 I think they provide you better situational awareness. 22:51.460 --> 22:59.760 Even in, you know, darkness, you're going to be able to see the terrain in front of you if you have a more recent system. 22:59.940 --> 23:03.940 So you're going to be able to see that because it's going to have the terrain database loaded into it. 23:03.940 --> 23:10.020 You're going to see that there's an antenna tower loaded and I have to refer down to a sectional chart and manually de-conflict. 23:10.020 --> 23:14.020 The aircraft is going to tell you that there's an issue coming up. 23:14.520 --> 23:20.960 All your approach procedures are going to be built into a database within the avionics. 23:21.300 --> 23:24.560 But what I feel that these need are some backup gauges. 23:24.560 --> 23:41.140 Now they have electronic backup gauges, but why not look for something that is reasonable and inexpensive and just use a couple of must-have backup instruments as your backups next to your steam gauges. 23:41.140 --> 23:42.840 I think that's the best way to go. 23:44.740 --> 23:48.780 All right, so a little blurb on avionics cost. 23:48.840 --> 23:52.380 And we're going to take the Garmin G3X for example. 23:53.000 --> 23:58.880 They make certified and experimental versions of the exact same display running the same firmware. 23:59.620 --> 24:04.860 Just it's been blessed by the FAA and received certification approval. 24:05.480 --> 24:08.320 $99.95 for just the display. 24:08.320 --> 24:21.800 That's without any of the instruments, without your magnetometer, without your airspeed sensors, your various electronic gyros, any of your engine instruments. 24:21.800 --> 24:24.420 $10,000 just for the display. 24:24.420 --> 24:28.120 Whereas the exact same experimental display is $3,895. 24:28.460 --> 24:32.360 So my opinion, best choice in avionics. 24:32.360 --> 24:37.000 What I like, the ones that I've actually displayed them for and they're not mine. 24:37.000 --> 24:38.500 I've just done research on them. 24:38.500 --> 24:43.800 But experimental glass with a emergency backup steam gauges is a great combination. 24:45.740 --> 24:50.920 Okay, so now that you've done this, you've actually built your aircraft, what's the next step? 24:50.920 --> 24:54.100 You have to get a special airworthiness certificate. 24:54.100 --> 25:08.660 So what you do is you work with what's called a DAR and you have it inspected and you get an airworthiness certificate that tells you you have to fly for 25 to 40 hours in a restricted area away from population. 25:08.660 --> 25:13.180 You have fly out of a special airport that's away from everyone else. 25:14.420 --> 25:24.480 And you have to basically fly off the number of hours to show that this aircraft is worthy to be operated on the same runways and areas that other aircraft operate. 25:24.840 --> 25:28.120 And if you DIY this, you effectively you are a test pilot. 25:28.740 --> 25:30.960 But there are people that you can hire for this. 25:30.960 --> 25:36.960 If you are not, you know, this is a level of risk that you don't necessarily want to undertake. 25:36.960 --> 25:43.400 There are people that you can hire that love to do this all the time that are very skilled, especially maybe for your particular airframe. 25:43.960 --> 25:46.900 But effectively what you have to do is you have to build a test plan. 25:46.900 --> 25:48.380 Same thing that test pilots would do. 25:48.380 --> 25:51.360 So the first thing you do is you fire up the engine, you test everything. 25:51.740 --> 25:55.680 Then you taxi around in a little bit, shut everything down, inspect everything. 25:56.500 --> 26:02.460 Then you undergo high speed taxi testing where you actually get almost up to flight speeds and then slow back down again. 26:03.020 --> 26:04.760 And then you have your first flight. 26:05.060 --> 26:10.620 And the biggest things I see in the plan sections are when you do this, you need to wear a parachute. 26:11.480 --> 26:25.600 I guess that assumes you need to have taken skydiving classes, but I guess any parachutes better than any parachute, even if you haven't been through this stuff, is better than not wearing one if you need to get out because you've gotten into an uncontrollable situation. 26:27.180 --> 26:30.520 But this is kind of like probably one of the most risky areas of flight. 26:30.520 --> 26:38.380 It's where a lot of the accidents happen because something was tinkered with, there were unintended consequences, and that's where disaster struck. 26:40.840 --> 26:41.920 So thank you. 26:41.920 --> 26:45.200 I think we're gonna have some Q&A after this, so we'll cut over to that. 26:45.200 --> 26:47.760 And please feel free, I look forward to your questions. 26:47.760 --> 26:49.420 Thank you for listening to my talk.