A screaming comes across the sky...
But this screaming is not from the rocket that opens Thomas Pynchon’s glorious novel Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s from me, and it’s not a scream exactly but more like the whine that comes out of the center of your chest when your body is suddenly taken in a direction it wasn’t expecting to go, with no respect for things like digestion and all those little floating tinkertoys in your inner ear.
Dick VanGrunsven has just casually whipped the control stick of his bright yellow RV-9 airplane left and right to show how light are the inputs and how responsive is the craft. We carve a rapid S some two thousand feet above the farm-checkered tablecloth of the Willamette Valley. The view through the Plexiglas bubble encircling our heads is spectacular, if a little jumpy.
We are zooming lightly and responsively around inside a canister of blue sky perhaps fifteen miles across, ringed with dark clouds trailing rain squalls like the hems of soggy wedding dresses. We’ve taken off from the small Aurora airport south of Portland, which is home to Van’s Aircraft, the company Dick founded in 1973 to manufacture kits for small sport airplanes. Thirty-four years and several thousand kits and flying machines later, his company is the largest of its kind in what is admittedly a small niche of the worldwide aviation industry.
As thrilling and as capable of eliciting moaning noises from the passenger as the RV-9 is, we are essentially going around the block in VanGrunsven’s commuter car. He lives on a private airpark thirty miles to the northwest, and takes his plane to work, feeling much safer in the free air than on the freeway. He keeps an old Volkswagen Rabbit parked at his Aurora factory in case the weather turns bad and he needs a more grounded way home.
We talk to each other through microphones and headphones — just forward of our toes is a 160-horsepower Lycoming aircraft engine with nothing but a stainless steel firewall in between — as VanGrunsven demonstrates how slow the RV-7 can go without stalling: 51 miles an hour. He’s about to show me how easily it climbs when he notices the dark walls of air and water beginning to get a little too close for comfort. We turn and descend back toward the airport as VanGrunsven calculates his latest return to earth, a planet he first left in 1948.
Take-off: After taxiing into position, the airplane accelerates down the runway until it reaches rotation speed; the pilot rotates, or tilts, the nose up to an angle between five and twenty degrees to increase lift from the wings and speed take-off. But most aircraft, especially light planes, given enough runway, would eventually take off even without rotation, as soon as they were moving forward fast enough for the lift generated by the air rushing over their wings to overcome the weight of the plane. They want the sky.
Verboort, Oregon, was founded in 1875 by a group of Dutch Catholic families, drawn by the fertile soil of the Tualatin Valley. Native son VanGrunsven was born near the end of 1939, the second of eight children, and he took his first plane ride, a short scenic flight, at age eight. In 1954, his father bought a small plane — a rare thing then and now. The family leveled a 670-foot-long airstrip on their small farm. By age 15, the $750 secondhand Piper J3 Cub, with his older brother at the controls, was taking VanGrunsven to the nearby Hillsboro Airport for lessons. At 16, he had his solo certification and a love of aviation that would last for life.
Thanks to alphabetical order, VanGrunsven was the last person ever to graduate from Verboort High School, which closed in 1957. He went on to the University — Oregon’s only Catholic university was, you might say, well-known in his Catholic community — and on the Bluff he majored in engineering and was pushed and shaped by then-engineering dean Wilbur Williams, whom VanGrunsven describes as “a diehard old-school engineer.” Between his studies, he was flying from the farm to the nearby private airstrips of Oregon-based experimental aviation pioneers George Bogardus (the first man to officially fly a home-built aircraft across the U.S.) and Hobie Sorrell. After graduating in 1961, VanGrunsven joined the U.S. Air Force. His plan to become a military pilot was grounded by a minor color vision problem, acceptable in civilian aviation but not to the Air Force. Throughout his military service, VanGrunsven kept flying, though, and he bought his first home-built airplane, a sporty but horsepower-challenged Stits Playboy. He soon bought a second Playboy, which he modified with double the power and a slick fighter-style bubble canopy. The second Playboy was sportier than the first, but it landed at too high a speed for a short airstrip and cruised at too slow a speed to have much fun.
When his tour of duty ended in 1964, VanGrunsven went to work as a mechanical engineer for Hyster in Portland, working on the design of lift trucks rather than aircraft. His free time was devoted to flying and modifying his plane. He removed the wood-and-fabric wings and replaced them with aluminum wings he built from his own design, adding flaps that lowered the landing speed enough to allow the plane, now rechristened with his initials as the RV-1, to use the short airstrip back home on the farm. “All my flying friends,” he says, “began referring to me as ‘the cheap Dutch-man who rebuilt his airplane just to avoid hanger rent at the airport.’”
Over the next three years, VanGrunsven logged 550 hours in the RV-1, many of them spent thinking about how to make it better. He eventually sold the plane (which is still flying four decades later), and set out to design a new plane himself.
“The pilot in me,” VanGrunsven says, “set the criteria for the engineer in me to work with. I knew what I wanted the aircraft to do, so I just had to design the plane to fulfill these parameters.” The engineer in him says this in the same quiet, no-big-deal tone that the pilot in him says things like “Well, there was the time the propeller shattered on a test flight...”
So, on a warm August day in 1971, the RV-3 lifted for the first time into the Oregon sky. (The RV-2, in case you’re wondering, was a side project, a wooden sailplane that was never finished or flown VanGrunsven has long been devoted to the sport of soaring, using rising air currents to keep a glider, usually unpowered, aloft as long as possible.) “The RV-3 was a delightful plane,” VanGrunsven says, “an improvement in every way over the RV-1.” Which means it was fast, agile, fun and supremely easy to fly; which in turn meant that every pilot who tried Dick’s RV-3 wanted one of their own. By 1973, without really planning it, the 34-year-old ex-lift-truck engineer was in the kit-aircraft business. At the time, he didn’t have a lot of competition for his kits, which he made almost single-handedly in a small shop behind his house. The sky was clear, and the wheels were up on Van’s Aircraft.
Climb: There are two common rates of climb in aviation, indicated by the terms Vx and Vy. Vx is “best angle of climb speed,” or the speed at which an aircraft will gain the most altitude in the shortest distance. Vy is “best rate of climb speed,” or the speed at which an aircraft will gain the most altitude in the shortest time. Because of factors including the angle of attack and lift generated relative to drag generated, Vx is usually a slower speed than Vy. At a given aircraft’s maximum ceiling, the highest altitude at which it can fly, Vx and Vy are the same. Most light aircraft reach for the sky at 500 to 1,500 feet per minute. The record holder for all piloted aircraft, a Russian Sukhoi SU-27 fighter jet, will climb that same 1,500 feet in 1.4 seconds.