A Creature of the Air

Notes on the engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur Dick VanGrunsven '61, pilot of the world's largest manufacturer of home-built airplanes.

By Todd Schwartz

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.

Dick VanGrunsven’s RV-3 was a big success in the world of kit aircraft, but there was a considerable drawback: only one seat. VanGrunsven grudgingly admitted that people were going to want to share what he calls “the RV grin” with a passenger. He doubted that he could reproduce the performance and fun of the RV-3 in a larger, heavier two-seat plane, so his first inclination was to try to convince everyone to just be satisfied with a single seat. Or, better yet, build two RV-3s. But, lacking a sufficient pool of anti-social customers, VanGrunsven began to design and build the RV-4 — in the hours he had left after cranking out RV-3 kits all day. He decided to go with tandem seating (fighter-plane style, with one seat behind the other) to maximize speed.

By the summer of 1979, the prototype was ready to fly, and VanGrunsven’s first time up revealed a success beyond anything he would have predicted: with the same power, the two-seat RV-4 was only 10 miles an hour slower than the RV-3, and the handling, control, and responsiveness of the single-seater had been retained. “It seems to me that aeronautics isn’t a totally exact science,” VanGrunsven says, “maybe because you can’t see the air. There are equations and rules and formulas that pretty much define what the result of any given design is going to be, but there’s always a little plus or minus margin. I usually come pretty close on estimated performance — if anything, we end up doing a little better than what the book may have predicted. I don’t know why, but it’s always worked out well.” The RV-4 that climbed and swooped and spun around the northwest Oregon sky that day worked out so well it would become one of the most popular kit airplanes in history. Nearly three decades later, several thousand of them have been sold and more than a thousand are arcing through the air all over the world. One, in fact, a specially modified version built by an Australian nurse-midwife named Jon Johanson, has flown completely around the world — three times. Imagine a tiny green-and-white airplane, built in a shed in Darwin in the Northern Terri-tory, with extra fuel tanks in the wings, fuselage, and back seat, buzzing along for more than fifteen hours above the empty blue Pacific on the longest leg of the trip: Hilo, Hawaii, to Santa Barbara, California. Not something VanGrunsven would have foreseen when the first orders for RV-4s began coming in.

It wasn’t long before customers began asking for an RV with side-by-side seating. The sport pilot in VanGrunsven was unenthusiastic, but the businessman in him knew that the home-built airplane market was shifting from pure sport airplanes to efficient touring aircraft. The engineer in him set about minimizing the expected loss of performance. While it may sound a bit like “Sybil builds an airplane,” the multiple-personality VanGrunsven process always seems to create great-flying and great-selling planes. Never the most practiced public relations person, VanGrunsven, when asked during development about the roomy 43-inch-wide cockpit of the new plane, grumbled “Well, if it’s going to be slow it might as well be comfortable.” But when the side-by-side RV-6 appeared in 1985, it was an immediate winner — nearly as fast as the RV-4 and almost identical in handling. (The RV-5, by the way, was a small single-seater — only one was ever built.) The RV-6 and its sister RV-6A (taildragger vs. tricycle landing gear — it’s a long story) would go on to be the best-selling kit aircraft in history. By the year 2000, more than 6,000 kits had been sold and more than two thousand were aloft.

As time passed, VanGrunsven moved Van’s Aircraft into progressively larger manufacturing facilities, and continued adding to the RV line-up. He and his wife Diane raised their three children. VanGrunsven filled the roles of company president, lead designer, and chief test pilot — the particular hat (and parachute) he was wearing on the day some twenty years ago that a wooden propeller blew into pieces during a test flight. “Fortunately, both blades came off at once, avoiding a destructive imbalance, and none of the fragments damaged the wings or the tail, which was good,” he says, with what seems to the average ground-lubber to be a fair degree of understatement. “But it simply meant that I had an inoperative engine and had to glide back to the airport and land.”

The RVs kept coming. The RV-8 model arrived, essentially an RV-4 on steroids. The RV-7 eventually replaced the RV-6. For easy, efficient cruising on low power there was the RV-9. In 2003, the company entered a whole new level of aviation when it introduced the RV-10, its first and only four-seat kit airplane — the sky in a much bigger box.

The RV-12 is in development, designed to be a very light (750 lbs.), fuel-efficient two-seater that performs well with only a 100-horsepower engine. And the RV-11? Well, that’s a pet project for the VanGrunsven who loves to soar: it’s an as-yet-unbuilt motorglider; essentially a sail­plane with its own engine so a tow into the air by another plane isn’t required.

Dick’s RVs, essentially the sports cars of the sky, are now being flown in some 25 countries (including Nigeria, where 60 RV-6s form the trainer fleet of the Nigerian Air Force) and are under construction in more than fifty countries. As of this past summer, 5,281 RVs have been completed and flown. Some 70 employees work at the Aurora factory, where computer-controlled machines costing $300,000 each cut, drill, and stamp sinuous shapes in blue-plastic-sheathed aluminum. Van’s Aircraft sells some 55 kits a month, more than anyone in the world. The climb has been steady.

Level flight: Airplane pilots know how high they are flying by using altimeters — essentially airborne barometers measuring air pressure, which decreases with altitude. But air pressure also varies over time and in different regions, so to be safe pilots must frequently contact the ground and reset their altimeters for the local pressure. If they didn’t, two planes could be flying at the same altitude even though their altimeters show different heights. This process would be problematic for fast-moving, far-ranging jet aircraft, so above what is known as “transition altitude” (18,000 feet above sea level in the U.S.), all aircraft calibrate their altimeter to a standard pressure (29.92 inches of mercury). They are then are assigned to “flight levels,” expressed in feet above mean sea level divided by 100. Therefore, “flight level 3-5-0” is 35,000 feet. Except it really isn’t. In the realm of air traffic control above transition, the actual altitude of two planes doesn’t matter, only the distance between them.

Dick and I walk through his 63,000-square-foot factory, passing the area where RV kits are packed in large crates and shipped worldwide. In an average year, Van’s Aircraft sells more RV kits than the aviation industry leaders sell of any single model of their most popular private planes. When it comes to the companies manufacturing single-engine aircraft, the 70-year old company Cessna and the relative upstart Cirrus (which began in 1984 as a kit airplane maker in Baraboo, Wisconsin) are the main players. Both claim to have the “most popular single-engine airplane in the world.” They each sell about 550 of their leading models per year. By contrast, that many Bentley automobiles, which cost about the same, are sold every four months.

A no-frills four-seat Cessna Skyhawk costs around $220,000. A base-model Cirrus begins around $200,000. A comparably equipped four-seat RV-10 will cost the builder around $120,000 — plus his or her labor time. The basic kits for most two-seat RV models cost less than $20,000, and come without engine, propeller, avionics, instruments, paint, and upholstery. The choices for power and electronics are numerous, but completed planes most often fall between $40,000 and $80,000. No comparable factory-produced high-performance planes exist — creating the void which VanGrunsven’s kits fill.

“Contrary to popular belief,” VanGrunsven says, “owning your own plane doesn’t always mean that you are independently wealthy. The people who buy and build our aircraft come from a wide cross-section — engineers, teachers, doctors, commercial pilots, a priest, a hotel manager. They do have one thing in common: the dedication to put in the necessary time and effort. Learning how to do the work and then building the plane usually takes between 1,200 and 3,000 man-hours. On a hobby basis that usually spreads out over a number of years. The record, I think, is 70 days to complete a QuickBuild RV-8. People, particularly professional people, often find working with their hands is a kind of therapy. Of course, some of the first RV kits we ever sold still haven’t been completed yet, but we never give up hope...”

These days, the kits come with predrilled, fully matched rivet holes, a big time-saver. For more money you can also buy the QuickBuild version, with the wings and fuselage partially completed. This will save several hundred hours and 49 percent of the work. And no more than 49 percent — to be licensed in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Experimental Amateur-Built category, the kit builder must do at least 51 percent of the work.

The nature of that work is not beyond the means of the average do-it-yourselfer. Riveting is a required skill, as virtually all current airplanes are made of riveted aluminum, a metal which is light, strong, easy to work, and relatively inexpensive. Van’s Aircraft kits helpfully include lots of trim scraps and extra rivets so the first-time builder can practice what, for most, is an unfamiliar operation. It isn’t exactly rocket science (although the skins of most rockets are riveted together). Simply follow the RV’s 430+ page instructional manual, which leads the builder step-by-step through the process. The company’s website is quick to point out that aluminum needs no adhesives and causes no health problems, other than “the occasional case of being sick and tired of working on it.” Like the founder, the Van’s Aircraft manual does not take itself too seriously.

For the right person, what will eventually emerge from the boxes is nothing less than a backstage pass to the sky itself, to the sheer joy of becoming a creature of the air — albeit a gasoline-powered temporary resident of that wild sky.

“Light aircraft are generally as safe as the person operating them,” VanGrunsven says. “Don’t stick your neck out; don’t fly yourself into situations or weather that you can’t handle, and you should stay out of trouble. You have to pay attention when flying, but it isn’t like you’re at a high level of adrenaline all the time. It’s not like the freeway; you don’t have to stay between the white lines or fight traffic for hours on end. It’s usually only the first few minutes and last few minutes that are challenging. Even then, you just have to be aware of the transition from operating in a gaseous medium to rolling on the ground. You have to make that transition successfully. That’s all it requires.”

Unfortunately for private aviation in this era, there are other requirements. “Slipping the surly bonds of earth and dancing the skies on laughter-silvered wings,” as Canadian Air Force pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr. wrote in his 1941 poem “High Flight,” requires some things that seem to be in short supply these days: a small-but-realistic tolerance for risk, a do-it-yourself (or fly-it-yourself) mindset, time away from kids and family duties, convenient and affordable small airports and, finally, the ability to attract younger generations and women.

According to FAA statistics, as reported by The New York Times, the number of student pilots has dropped by one-third since 1990, from 129,000 to 88,000. The number of private pilots is down from 299,000 to 236,000. Most of those pilots are in their forties and older, and they are at least ninety percent male (VanGrunsven’s kit customers are 99 percent male). Go to almost any local general aviation airfield and the majority demographic of the pilots you meet will be “retired white guy.”

Earning a pilot’s license takes several months and costs $5,000 to $7,000 — although there is a new class of limited “sport pilot” license that costs less. But observers believe that even beyond the money required to learn and to fly, it is a combination of fear (generated by everything from the fatal crashes of celebrity pilots like John Kennedy Jr. to memories of September 11), Americans’ falling tolerance for risk (how many airbags does your car have?), the aging of the Boomers, and the failure to interest women and minorities that threaten private flying.

This is happening at a time when flying a small plane is the easiest and safest it has ever been. Fatal light plane accidents decreased 25 percent in the past decade, and advances in electronics and the addition of auto-pilot and GPS to even the smallest planes make the skies that much friendlier. And there is another irony here: Flying, a technology-intensive pursuit, is being given a miss by the most technology-savvy generation in history. Perhaps they prefer their skies to be virtual.

None of this matters, of course to VanGrunsven and his customers, who share a love of flying that conquers all, and, with Dick’s kits, a relatively affordable way to indulge that love — on laughter-silvered and self-riveted wings. It is not only the sky that comes in the Van’s Aircraft boxes, it is freedom and accomplishment and joy.

“I’ve had so many wonderful experiences flying,” says VanGrunsven, who has logged more than 11,000 hours in the air, “that anything I could say would sound like a cliché. But if it weren’t overwhelmingly enjoyable, pilots like myself wouldn’t be paying the various prices we pay to do it.”

Other than a professed inability to completely retire, it’s difficult to imagine what price the 67-year-old pilot/engineer/businessman has to pay, other than rising in the morning, slipping the not-particularly-surly bonds of North Plains, Oregon, and banking his trademark yellow (“I like yellow, it’s cheery”) RV-7 toward Aurora. He cheerily tilts the stick, one aileron (French for “little wing”) goes up and one goes down, the plane rolls crisply, and the sky welcomes Dick VanGrunsven once more.

Todd Schwartz (schwartz@spiritone.com) has committed many lovely profiles of alumni in these pages, among them the genius brain scientist Mike Merzenich, the surfing visionary Jack O’Neill, nurse and Iraq War veteran Rod Camacho, cheerful unofficial mayor of Lake Oswego Gene Wizer, and many more.