Ultimate Issue: It's Time to Air Out the Kit Question

Why are there so few new homebuilt aircraft companies to choose from?

Marc Cook

Wednesday, July 24, 2024 at 09:12 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Kimberly Johnson

The DarkAero project is one of relatively few new airplane designs on the horizon. [Courtesy: DarkAero]

Key Takeaways:

Experimental aviation evolved from requiring extensive home fabrication to the rise of comprehensive "kit" airplanes in the 1970s, which greatly simplified the building process and improved aircraft performance.
Modern builders now expect highly pre-fabricated kits with advanced features like matched-hole construction to minimize build time and potential errors, necessitating significant factory investment in advanced tooling and manufacturing.
High startup costs (millions of dollars), builder conservatism favoring established brands due to past failures, and the cost advantages of incumbent companies create substantial barriers to entry for new kit plane manufacturers.

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Experimental aviation has been a serious thing since, well, the beginning. Orville and Wilbur were homebuilders, for sure, but it wasn’t until after World War II that the FAA agreed to carve out a licensing path for airplanes built in your barn or garage.

From the Experimental/Amateur-Built category’s emergence in 1947 through the founding of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in 1953, the classification grew slowly—in part because building on your own meant doing everything: welding, working with fabric, painting, upholstering, wiring, and plumbing. Once you’d found all the raw materials you needed, of course.