As a flight adviser, Ron Liebmann's official duty is to evaluate the skills of a pilot preparing to fly an airplane for the first time. He starts by talking about experience.
Then Liebmann morphs into something of an aviator psychologist, which he insists is necessary to deal with "homebuilders," amateurs who construct their airplanes in garages, basements, even a firehouse.
Too often, the devotion needed to make such a craft can blind a do-it-yourselfer to potentially fatal mechanical flaws, Liebmann said. The pilots can become a little obsessive.
He knows. In 1991, after spending 1,300 hours building a gleaming red and white 65-horsepower Kitfox — mostly in the Hoffman Estates firehouse where he worked — Liebmann accelerated it down the runway in Marengo for a test flight and stopped, unable to take off.
"In my mind, I'd given birth to it," said Liebmann, a retired firefighter-paramedic. "My personal attachment to the airplane was so strong it fogged my judgment, and that's what happens to everybody."
Liebmann and other members of the growing homebuilder community hope to learn from the crash that claimed the life of veteran flier John Morrison. On July 31, his homebuilt E-Racer slammed into a cornfield near Aurora on its first flight.
Morrison, 73, of Aurora, certainly had extensive experience flying planes he built. In 2000 and 2008, he managed to safely crash-land planes he had created, NTSB records report. The National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report on the July crash is expected this week.
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