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 …
Ultralight and Electric – The Red Tail Hawk
Many of us dream of retiring and pursuing the dreams that sustained us during our careers. One man has done that with the kind of work ethic that makes retirement highly productive. He maintains two web sites; a Yahoo group dedicated to his latest homebuilt electric sailplane, and a more inclusive overview of his many aeronautical projects. Jerry Booker took early retirement from the architectural technology profession, and having grown up on a farm, “enjoyed ‘green’ living, with a lot of physical activity, and now [lives] in the farm country in central Illinois.” Designing and building even a simple airplane is a task that requires the willingness to learn and explore new ideas, and if that craft includes an electric powerplant, a willingness to experiment at a fairly high level. Jerry reports, “I always had an interest in research, design, and development, and am mostly self-educated from reading and trying things. “In addition to Alex Strojnik, I got a lot from the …