Homemade Highflyers

Grand Prix drivers like to talk about the rubber they burn when drifting through a chicane. A steeplechase rider will verbally rebreak every bone in his body at the drop of a crop. But none of those dangers can hold a Band-Aid to the ones experienced routinely by the madmen of sporting masochism: racing pilots. Whipping airplanes around pylons mere yards above the deck is a sport so risky that it all but disappeared from the U.S. scene after famed Flyer Bill Odom crashed to his death in 1949. Since 1964 it has come roaring back.

The hot-rock aviators who converged on Reno for last week's National Championship Air Races divided naturally into two classes. There were the pros, like Lockheed Test Pilot Darryl Greenamyer, 31, who won the "unlimited" championship in a surplus Navy Grumman Bearcat, wrenching his way around an eight-mile course at 396 m.p.h. And there were the purists, like 54-year-old Bill Falck of Warwick, N.Y., who screamed around a 2.5-mile course at 202 m.p.h. to win the Formula I competition. In airplane racing, the difference between the pros and the purists is that purists, like Falck, build their own planes.

Chain-Saw Power. The purists are proliferating. According to Paul Poberezny, president of the 40,000-member Experimental Aircraft Association, at least 2,500 homemade airplanes are currently buzzing about the U.S.'s crowded sky--with another 7,000 in various stages of construction in garages and basement workshops. "I know of one man," says Poberezny, "who built a plane in the cabin of a Great Lakes ore ship." Working in his spare time, with a good set of commercial plans (most popular: the Pitts Special biplane), a handy do-it-yourself enthusiast can turn out an airworthy, 100-m.p.h. plane for as little as $1,500.

The more adventurous design their own around Volkswagen engines or the sturdy, simple Model A Ford motor. In a pinch, almost any old engine will do. One latter-day Orville Wright powered his homemade biplane with a pair of chain-saw motors.

Accidents Will Happen. Novel designs come in for closer scrutiny, but even so, the Federal Aviation Administration is inclined to be permissive. "This is a free country," explains FAA Inspector Jim Donathan. "Guys can break their necks if they want to. Our job is to be sure they don't kill somebody on the ground." Still, accidents happen, particularly in the hairy sport of pylon racing. While cutting a tight turn around a 55-ft.-high pylon, a plane may pull up to six G.s even as it is being subjected to severe turbulence from the prop wash of competitors. The results can be catastrophic. While testing his homemade racer at Fort Worth last May, Georgia's Nick Jones was tooling along merrily--when a wing fell off. Jones was lucky: he parachuted to safety. The accident did not prevent him from borrowing another home-built to race at Reno last week.

Only the six fastest planes got to the finals. Five scrambled aloft ahead of Bill Falck, whose 800-lb. red and silver Rivets, powered by an 85-h.p. Continental engine, was the heaviest plane in the field. Searching for clear air, Falck decided to take his plane "high"--250 ft. above the ground. The tactic paid off. Keeping track of his competitors by watching their shadows on the ground, Falck passed plane after plane. Finally, nosing down through the last lap to pick up a bit of extra speed, he zoomed across the finish line, the winner by 300 yds. That made Hot Rock Falck the national Formula I champion for the second slipstreaming year in a row.

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