My Airplane

My airplane is a Long-EZ, a canard pusher designed by Burt Rutan in the late 1970s.  (Mine was built from plans and finished in 1997 and no, I did not build it.)  In spite of its 30-year-old design, it is as fast and economical as any of today's homebuilts (and much more so than any certificated model of similar horsepower).  For more information on the breed, read about it in the Wikipedia or go to http://www.ez.org/

Pictures


Location

The following links will display the position and track of my airplane using the APRS equipment installed in Long-EZ 821RP.  APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) is a technology that uses GPS and VHF ham radio to transmit position reports as packets of data.  The data eventually makes its way to servers on the Internet which can be queried  to display current position and track overlaid on an appropriate map.  Read more in the FAQ.

If I'm flying when you click on a link, the position data is near real-time!

Activities

The following are some canard aircraft flying activities in which I've participated.  All contain pictures of my Long-EZ and other canard aircraft.

Tracks

Here are the tracks of some selected flights on a Google map made by "recording" the flight using the installed APRS equipment.  The map has aircraft icons corresponding to each APRS position report along with tabular data showing latitude/longitude, heading, speed, and altitude.

Note: these Google maps take a lot of bandwidth and processing power.  Don't be surprised if it "brings your computer to its knees" for a few seconds after clicking on one of the links.  Also, the red line connecting each aircraft icon doesn't display very well after zooming in more than a time or two.
02 Sep 2007  "Timed Event" (formerly a race) at Kanab, UT.  The track shows an immediate left turn after takeoff, head east to Big Water, turn hard left over "three metal buildings" to a "cut in the mountain where the highway turns north", and return to Kanab with some cooling down maneuvering on the west side.

31 Jul 2007  Local area sightseeing flight.  If you zoom in one time, you can clearly see a lap around Mann Lake (to the east) right after takeoff from Lewiston (ID) before heading south to check out the forest fires burning in the Chimney Complex blaze.  From there we headed north and then northeast into the setting sun and descended into the Snake River canyon for low level flight back to Lewiston.  A couple of trips around the traffic pattern help toward my night landing currency!

05 Apr 2007  Return from Creswell, OR.  This is pretty much a straight-line flight returning to Lewiston after transporting Dale Martin over to pick up another Long-EZ.  On the way home we flew in formation and Dale took this picture my airplane while it was somewhat lined up with the big mountains in western Oregon and Washington.  About 2 hours enroute and cruising at 11,500 MSL.

30 Oct 2006  Return to Lewiston from William J. Fox Field in Lancaster, CA with stops in Tehachipe, CA (for fuel) and Nampa, ID (for food and warmup).  Tehachipe is only a few air-miles from Lancaster and had the cheapest gas around so I took on 40 gallons.  That was more than enough to reach Lewiston but after almost 4 hours at altitude bucking a headwind, I was ready for a bite to eat at the Nampa airport cafe (and to warm my feet).

12 Oct  2006  Spokane, WA and Coeur d'Alene, ID.   I flew to Felts Field in Spokane for lunch (about 35 minutes), then Coeur d'Alene (another 10 minuts) for a quick visit with Larry and Liz Booher at the Heliprop FBO, then home to Lewiston.



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