Strangers from the Sky

For the past couple of years I have been going to the the LAA yearly Air Rally held at Sywell near Northamption, UK to work on a project of mine. It is the biggest yearly rally of ultralight planes organised by the LAA, Light Aircraft Association. The main reason I have been going, besides for my passion about airplanes and flight, is because I found out that a good percentage of these planes are actually home built. Some from litteraly “plane kits”, some are refurbished vintage planes, and some are completely new designs, straight out their owners mind. 

Now I have heard about people building kit cars in their garages, this being a typical British or American hobby admittedly, and driving them on track days; but a plane is a whole other level in terms of theoretical concepts, complexity, assembly, safety standards, and piloting! 

For this reason I wanted to meet the people that spend sometimes even years working on long term projects sometimes even in their own living rooms for them to then fly them around. 

I was lucky enough to meet a wide variety of people. Some just wanted to build their childhood dream plane, some wanted to design one from scratch, some inherited the actual plane from their parents, or others are just fans of particular vintage models and decided to restore them. Some have taken years to barely complete one, some have constructed many.

What I particularly love about all these planes are the incredible designs some of these have. Like the old story that the bumblebee, from a theoretical point of view, should not be able to fly, some of these designs look totally bonkers and borderline cartoonish. And yet, once the rally is over, they all take off from the landing strip and fly home like they would just normally drive a car.