Like many of you, I’m an aircraft owner. I have been one for a long time. I bought my first airplane—a Cessna 182—in 1968 when I was 24 years old. Four years later at age 28, I traded up to a Bellanca 17-30A Super Viking. Then at age 43, I upgraded to a Cessna Turbo 310, which I’ve now owned for 37 years. Since I’m now 80, it’s a safe bet that this one is my last airplane. Sigh.
All of these have been certificated airplanes. All had type designs that passed muster with the FAA as evidenced by their Type Certificates and Standard Airworthiness Certificates. Consequently, all came with costly strings attached. As owner, I was legally responsible for keeping them in “an airworthy condition.”
Among other things, this meant that every 12 months they had to undergo an “annual inspection” by an IA to ensure that they continued to comply with their type design. They also had to comply with any applicable Airworthiness Directives and Airworthiness Limitations that the FAA saw fit to publish, some of which could be quite painful. Any significant improvements I wanted to make to the aircraft were considered “alterations to the type design” and had to pass muster with the FAA in the form of an STC or Field Approval. Any repair or modification parts had to be FAA-approved (or at least “acceptable for installation on a certificated product”).
Is all this FAA-mandated red tape just the price we must pay for the privilege of slipping the surly bonds of earth? Well, not exactly.
A Different World
Every year, as the last week of July approaches. I point my airplane toward Lake Winnebago and enter a singularity in the aeronautical space-time continuum known as AirVenture where Newtonian mechanics and 14 CFR Part 43 do not apply. During that one week out of each 52, I find myself surrounded by thousands upon thousands of beautiful aircraft that are not only capable of slipping the surly bonds of earth but also the surly bonds of FAA regulatory red tape.
These magnificent flying machines don’t have Type Certificates or FAA-approved type designs. Since they don’t have type designs, they don’t need to have annual inspections to ensure that they are in compliance (although they do have 12-month “condition inspections” to ensure they’re in condition for safe flight). With rare exceptions, they aren’t subject to Airworthiness Directives or Airworthiness Limitations. Their owners can improve or modify them any way they like without FAA blessing, provided only that those alterations don’t make the aircraft unsafe to fly. Maintenance can be done by non-A&Ps, and condition inspections don’t need to be done by IAs. Unbelievable!
The FAA refers to these aircraft as “Experimental – Amateur Built” or “E-AB” for short. This terminology is a bit misleading. The majority of E-ABs are well-proven designs like the Van’s RV, Lancair, Glasair, Sonex, Long-EZ and Zenith, each with fleet sizes in the thousands (well over 10,000 for RVs), so they’re not exactly experimental. While some of them are built by actual amateurs, lots are built by highly experienced aircraft builders, sometimes under contract to a non-builder owner (often referred to as “hired guns”). So the builders are a decidedly mixed bag of amateurs, professionals, and semi-pros.
When I look at these E-ABs on the flight line at AirVenture, I find it hard not to drool. Many are breathtakingly gorgeous. Most have wall-to-wall glass cockpits that put my 1979-vintage steam-gauge panel to shame. Many are faster than my Cessna 310, some a whole lot faster. A few are pressurized and/or turbine-powered. These are really serious aircraft. Is it any wonder that E-ABs are nowadays the fastest growing segment of the GA fleet?
So, am I jealous that the owners of these gorgeous E-ABs are minimally regulated by the FAA and can do pretty much anything they want? You bet your life I am!
But Are They Safe?
Intuitively, you might think that these minimally-regulated amateur-built airplanes are less safe than certificated aircraft with their FAA-blessed designs and burdensome regulatory constraints. At first glance, you’d be right about that.
The overall GA accident statistics have been a moving target. Fortunately, they’ve been moving in the right direction: downward. In the 1960s when I started flying, the accident rate for GA was consistently over 10 accidents per 100,000 hours. In 1970, the rate peaked at 13.5 per 100,000 hours. Since then, safety initiatives by the FAA and industry plus improved technologies such as GPS, ADS-B, iPads, Foreflight and satellite-downlinked real-time weather in the cockpit have made GA much safer. In 2019, the NTSB reported 1,220 GA accidents (233 of them fatal) for an accident rate of 4.87 per 100,000 hours (and a fatal accident rate of 0.89 per 100,000 hours). This is a huge improvement, and something we can all be proud of.
E-ABs have fared less well. Historically, the E-AB accident rate has been about three times as high as the overall GA accident rate—somewhere in the 20s per 100,000 hours. But this has also been improving dramatically in recent years. In 2011, for example, E-ABs constituted about 10% of the GA fleet, but were responsible for 15% of the total GA accidents and 21% of the fatal GA accidents. This suggests that you are 1.5 times more likely to have an accident flying an E-AB than flying a certificated aircraft, and more than twice as likely to have a fatal accident.
So, does this mean that the regulatory burden of operating a certificated aircraft is actually worth it in terms of greater safety? The answer to that question gets a bit complicated, mainly because some E-ABs are a whole lot more experimental and amateur-built than others. The E-AB fleet comprises a very wide range of designs, most built from kits but some built from scratch, most fairly conventional designs but some very exotic and unusual, most fairly easy to fly but some quite challenging. All of these are combined into the overall E-AB accident figures.
More than half of all E-AB accidents involve engine failure, either as the proximate cause or a contributing factor. While many E-ABs are powered by certificated engines (mostly Lycomings) or near-identical clones thereof, others are powered by a variety of non-certificated engines including various automotive engine conversions (like VW, Corvair and Subaru). The data shows that engine failure accidents are far more likely with non-certificated engines (particularly auto conversions) than with certificated ones.
By far the most popular and populous E-AB aircraft is the Van’s RV-series. Roughly 11,000 of them are now flying. RVs come in a bunch of sizes and flavors. Most are two-seat (some tandem, other side-by-side), though the RV-10 is four-place. Many models cam be configured either as tricycle gear or tailtraggers. Some are designed for aerobatics, others optimized for cross-country flying. Most are Lycoming-powered although some have Rotax 900-series engines.
The RV-series has a substantially lower accident rate than the E-AB fleet as a whole. But some RV models have better safety records than others. An in-depth safety study published in Kitplanes magazine in January 2020 indicated that the RV-7, RV-8 and RV-9 variants had less than half the accident rate of the overall E-AB fleet over the 20-year study period from 1998 through 2017. That would appear to place these models at a comparable accident rate with certificated aircraft. Interestingly, the -7 is a side-by-side aerobatic, the -8 is a tandem aerobatic, and the -9 is a side-by-side X-C machine; all three are available in both trike and taildragger versions.
Another thing worth considering is that a disproportionately large number of E-AB accidents (particularly fatal ones) occur during the initial Phase I Flight Test period, which generally comprises the first 40 flight hours after build completion. No big surprise there. This is a uniquely challenging time when the aircraft’s flight characteristics and systems reliability are unknown—they truly are “experimental” at this point—and when the pilot is least familiar with the aircraft. One study concluded that 9% of E-AB accidents occur in the first 10 hours of flight testing, which if true would be a hideous hourly accident rate if you do the math. When the Phase I Flight Test period is excluded, E-AB hourly accident rates drop considerably.
One way to avoid the Phase I Flight Test risk is not to built an E-AB aircraft but rather to buy one that has already been built and taken through flight testing by someone else, either an actual amateur builder or a professional hired gun. The percentage of E-AB owners who are not the original builders has been rapidly increasing. Fully half of today’s owners of Van’s RVs bought rather than built them.
Best of Both Worlds?
Consider the following thought experiment: Suppose the FAA created a new aircraft classification that I’ll call “Experimental—Commercial Built” (abbreviated “E-CB”) consisting of commercially-built type-certificated aircraft whose owners elected to renounce the type certificates and have them reclassified as E-CBs instead. A previously certificated aircraft that was transitioned to E-AB could no longer be used for compensation or hire, and would be regulated by the FAA just as if they were E-ABs.
Once transitioned from certificated to E-CB, the aircraft could be modified without the need for STCs or field approvals, repaired using non-approved parts, maintained by the owner (or anyone else, for that matter), and have experimental avionics, autopilots and other equipment installed. Its annual condition inspection could be signed off by any A&P mechanic (not necessarily an IA), and it would be largely unaffected by airworthiness directives or airworthiness limitations.
If the FAA created such an E-CB classification and transition process for certificated aircraft, how many owners of Beechcraft, Cessnas, Cirruses, Mooneys and Pipers would take the Agency up on this deal? (Don’t everybody raise your hands at once!) I know I would…in a heartbeat.
To be fair, there would be some downsides to such a transition. For one thing, it would be irrevocable and irreversible—once a certificated aircraft was converted to E_CB, it could never go back to being certificated and never again be used for compensation or hire. It would be required to have the word “EXPERIMENTAL” prominently displayed near the cockpit entry door, which might spook some passengers. It’s possible that some aircraft insurance underwriters might not offer coverage to E-CBs, and other underwriters might charge higher premiums.
How would this affect safety? We can only speculate about that, of course. But since every E-CB aircraft would by definition have an original type design thoroughly vetted by the FAA and most would have hundreds or thousands of hours in service prior to transitioning to E-CB, it seems reasonable to assume that they would be at least as safe as an RV-7, -8 or -9. In other words, they would most likely have accident rates comparable to the current GA fleet comprised overwhelmingly of certificated aircraft.
Hey Elon and Vivek, here’s an idea…