The sleek, fast, technologically advanced plane that carried John Denver to his death Sunday is classified by the Federal Aviation Administration as an "experimental aircraft."
That's because, unlike the more familiar Cessnas and Pipers that line the runways at most general aviation airports, Denver's futuristic Long-EZ aircraft wasn't built in a factory.
Denver's plane was home-built--assembled in a garage or a hangar by someone who purchased the plans and did most of the work himself. The work wasn't done by Denver--officials said he bought the completed plane several days ago from the original owner, who built it.
Some of the standards for home-builts are less stringent than those for factory-production planes.
The designs for factory aircraft must be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. But a home-built craft like the Long-EZ is exempt from FAA certification rules governing stability, control response and minimum stalling speed.
Factory aircraft are assembled by FAA-certified mechanics at an FAA-approved facility, while FAA inspectors monitor the process. Federal rules mandate that at least 51% of the assembly work on a home-built be done by the owner, who seldom is a certified mechanic. Although the assembly of home-builts is often checked by FAA inspectors or other aviation experts, such checks are not mandatory.
Before they can be flown by the public, prototypes of factory planes must be tested, flown and certified by the FAA. When a home-built is completed, the FAA checks the work, but it is the owner-builder who makes the first flight.
With so much less federal oversight, are home-builts still safe?
"Absolutely," says Dick Knapinski, a spokesman for the Experimental Aircraft Assn. in Oshkosh, Wis.
Such planes, he said Monday, are not designed by amateurs. The designer of the Long-EZ is Burt Rutan, the man who designed the Voyager, the first plane to circumnavigate the globe without refueling.
Knapinski noted that the home-builts are subject to the same annual inspections as the factory planes.
Nonetheless, statistics provided by the Airplane Owners and Pilots Assn. include troubling figures indicating that home-builts--which account for about 19,000 of the 180,000 general aviation aircraft now in service in the United States--aren't as reliable and as well maintained as the factory planes.
