How a Banking Crisis Built an Airplane
All politics may be local, but not all incentives are perverse
One autumn afternoon in 2000, a Zenair CH 601 HDS strained upward from the Morehead-Rowan County Airport near Morehead, Kentucky. My father, the pilot, expressed genuine concern that we might not clear the rapidly-approaching treetops due to my exceptionally heavy bags; several stories in the air, it was an unsettling prospect ultimately rendered obsolete by a safe landing on a runway pressed into a flat expanse of central Ohio.
As a high school senior, dad’s home-built aircraft offered the only viable method of visiting a friend who had begun college surrounded by Appalachian mountains. At once cautionary and provocative, the word EXPERIMENTAL shouted its presence in black sans-serif letters from the inside of each door, seeming to offer both pilot and passenger one last chance to demur.
Why not categorize the aircraft as “amateur built” or even the more pejorative “non-professional”? I’ve always had difficulty equating experimental with non-commercial or amateur despite the miscellany of state and federal statutes and regulations making it so. Experimental connotes the hesitant nature of an experiment, of course; but in the phrase experimental knowledge, it indicates something “based on or derived from experience,” like…
