The plans - Part 1

So, just how does one go about building one of these things?

As it turns out it is a journey of discovery, more akin to an archaeological dig, than just blindly following the directions of a CAD drawn blueprint.

Indeed nowadays there are many airplane kits on the market for which the builder simply lines up CNC pre-drilled holes in the skin, and rivets the parts together. There is nothing wrong with that, the success ratio is pretty high, and the airplane quality very consistent. But the builder is more of an assembler of pre-made parts, rather than being able to start from the ground up. There is still a lot of work left to do, make no mistakes, but it's like the difference between building a sand castle, and a Lego one. You can have fun with both but, while you put together a Lego construction, you actually create the sand castle.

The Long EZ is a plans-built aircraft. This means that you start your project with ... a bunch of paper, and nothing else. It is up to you to provide what separates your plans from a flying object.

At least theoretically, because it actually is a little more complicated than that. You see, the designer, Burt Rutan, developed the Long EZ around 1980, and sold the plans until around 1985. Back it the 80s, computers were just in their infancy, and played no role in the development of the airplane, and of its plans.

The plans are typewritten, and have occasional handwritten corrections on them, and the drawings are sometimes cartoonish. While probably state of the art in 1980, they are not so much today. What's worse is that the company who made them, RAF (Rutan Aircraft Company), no longer exists, so your technical support is ... zero.

The first hurdle in the process is getting your hands on an actual set of plans. These plans were trademarked, and required that the registration page be returned to RAF, for the issuance of a serial number. The trademark also stated that only one aircraft could be built from a set of plans.

Thirty years later it's pretty hard to come by an original, unused set of plans, with a registration number. I was lucky, thanks to a tip from a friend, I had the opportunity to purchase such a set, but I had to go to Oslo, Norway, to get them. That worked out well because I was able to trade my Stockholm trip for an Oslo one, and left for Norway the next morning to meet with the seller. 

Eyes closed ... jet lag, you know!

Before long I was on my way back to the U.S. with a pristine set in tow.

Bringing the plans home

Because RAF no longer exists, there is no one to enforce the trademark, so an underground market of fake manuals has sprung up. Many of these frauds are sold on eBay every year, most are copies of the original, but occasionally some already-used manuals pop up as well.

Personally, I was glad to have had the opportunity to own the original unused set of plans, and I think Mr Rutan would approve.

Of course these plans have been revised a few times during the past 30 years, and no set of plans can be considered complete without these revisions. To that end, RAF published a newsletter called "Canard Pusher" (CP), through which the revision to the plans would be distributed, and every plan holder was required to be a subscriber. The CP started in May 1974, and ended in October 2002; 109 issues in all, of which the April 1980 issue (#24), was the first to include the Long EZ.

The builder was (and is) expected to comb through all the CPs (1398 pages), find the plan changes that apply to his plane (CPs included many RAF designs), and transcribe them on the plans, at the specified page. Can you spell tedious?

Luckily someone (Marc Borom and a few others) went through the whole CP set and extracted the Long EZ changes. Here's a link to the condensed version, and here's one to the whole CP set.


As you can imagine, the process took many months, and innumerable pauses to complete; but now that it is done, the real work can begin.