Jerry Booker – A One Man CAFE Foundation

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

An engineer retired to southern Illinois farm country, Jerry Booker has designed and built several airplanes, his latest being the Red Tail Hawk, a Part 103-compliant self-launching ultralight sailplane.  He has flown 15 times in his new creation, maintaining meticulous notes and downloading data for review by others.  His empirical approach to testing the limits of his electric powerplant (a Randall Fisher 18 horsepower brushed motor/controller combination) and airframe represent a thorough and careful examination of a type of airplane that other homebuilders might be able to make with currently available systems. Jerry’s flight reports are dispassionate and carefully logged, following much of the approach and including many of the criteria developed over the years by the CAFE Foundation.  He uses an EagleTree flight data recorder that was developed for model aircraft to track the ups, downs and other parameters of his flights.  He checks his airspeed against an Etrex GPS.  Jerry posts the results of each flight in the …