Today the LA Times called me on the phone in response to the crash. Kevin Pang, the writer, had apparently called some local EAA chapter presidents, who all pointed him at this web site as an example of how some builders thoroughly document their projects. Kevin was interested in getting my perspective on the risk of flying a homebuilt aircraft. It turned into a long phone interview, and Kevin sent a photographer from the Times out to do a photo shoot. I spread the word to the SoCal RV list, that they were coming to the hangar to do the shoot, and a couple of people (Dave Richardson and Tom Prokop) showed up.
The photographer hadn't spoken with Kevin about our interview, and he was just told that this was a piece on only me. I kept asking if we could take some photos with the guys, but the photographer kept weasling his way out of it. He ended up taking about 100 photos of me doing various unnatural things to and around the plane. Dave Richardson snapped a few of these photos of the photos (weird).
This is a shot of the shot that ended up in the LA Times on Sunday July 10. Here is a link to the story on the LA Times web site. If you need a login to their site, you can either register for free, or you can "borrow" a login from BugMeNot.
I really wanted to get some photos of Tom, Dave, and me together to kind of show that there's a real community effort behind these "rickety" homebuilts, and that we're all there to help each other make our projects as safe as they can be. Finally the photographer agreed to do a shot of us with Tom's plane there as well.
All in all, the article was pretty good. Kevin tried to be fair and represent both sides of the fence as far as perception of homebuilts goes. I think we need to do our best to educate the general public about what it is we're all trying to do, and why this really ends up being the safest way to go. As Tom puts it, "These are not homebuilt, they are CUSTOM built." I'm just kind of paranoid about people who know nothing about aviation reacting to a crash, and the reaction getting overblown and possibly turning into regulation that restricts my freedom. Anything I can do to avoid that...sign me up. I think Young Eagles is a decent way to expose kids to aviation, and that's good for the future and all that -- but I don't think many of the kids come away with any real perspective on homebuilts specifically being better or worse or safer or riskier than anything else. I imagine for most of these kids it's just a "wow, I went flying today and the guy let me move the stick...cool" type of thing. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying we need to go BEYOND the kids in spreading the word about these types of planes. Anyway, I don't have any clear ideas on how to accomplish this other than sending the right message and communicating effectively whenever the door does open.