Photos below of our big day. Finally, after 17-years of building, we scheduled our DAR inspection for December 3, 2021. We were ready with a table for his laptop, printer and documents. Plus coffee and donuts and muffins I had baked. (You do know I'm the official cook and baker for our group!) Dave drove down from Maryland, luckily escaping any pileups on I-95.
Dave was pleased with what he saw. He quizzed us on many topics. He asked for our builders logs. Asked about our weight and balance and CG calculations. He carefully checked the Lycoming data plate and our stainless data plate attached on the left rear fuselage under the elevator. All OK. He looked at our splendid multi-screen (we have 3 GRT EFISs/a Garmin 650/Garmin GTR200/ GPS Com/Trio Pro Pilot/VP-200 electrical system control panel/CO Guardian panel mounted CO sensor/Advanced Flight AOA/ and many other electronics items that fill our panel. He checked to be sure our oil pressure and other readouts showed proper limits. Doug answered all his questions about avionics with deep knowledge. In 3.5 hours he was done and handed us our signed Certificate of Airworthiness. You can see the last photo of the happy moment below.
Unfortunately, our 4th Brutus Russell, was not in attendance due to a pre-scheduled trip. But he gets the thanks for being the spark plug that started us on the road to building Sportsman S/N 7032, by buying a GlaStar tail kit way back in 1997. We started building the tail kit in January, 2004 and then found out happy news from Harry Delong when we were ready to buy the wing and fuselage kits. The GlaStar tail kit would work perfectly with Sportsman fuselage and wing kits!
However, our DAR did surprise us with the news we would have to fly 40 minimum test hours since we have the marvelous, but not certified, dual eMags. If they were Slicks, he would have specified 25 hours. But, much to our gratitude, he didn't delineate our test area as a 50-mile circle around Hanover County Airport, but gave us a much larger area enclosed by straight lines connecting 6 airports. He said that large polygon would allow us more airspace to carefully take the multitude of data points which will be required to fill out for the 10 data cards which are part of the EAA Flight Test Kit. He was very pleased we were using that kit.
And, being especially, worried we just might have missed something in our build, we decided to repeat the super detailed checklist in Section X of the Sportsman Builders Manual. We opened up all the inspection plates and panels on the plane; removed the baggers floor and the seats and seat pans, removed the elevator, rudder and horizontal stabilizer ended up taking 2+ days for the re-inspection. Now we were very satisfied we've done everything Glasair Aviation specified, and much more.
But we are not finished as we continue thinking of "niceties" like sealing the cabin from air leaks, a job which proved to be rather difficult due to the folding wing design. As you should be able to tell from my description, we are and have been, very picky with all parts of our project. We are looking forward to our first flight, for which, following our history, we are hiring a professional test pilot to do. Then he will give us transition training for our new flying machine.
Written by Dee Whittington, official scribe for this project.