Stealth Pilot wrote:

Dont you guys ever feel totally unnerved by the fact that you have no
real idea of just where the strengths and weaknesses lie in a design?

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So fill the void yourself. Slide rule, #2 yaller pencil and the back
of an envelop, you're half way there. (You may use a calculator, if
you wish.)

The other half has to do with the basic purpose of the 'Experimental -
Amateur Built' licensing category, in that it exists to foster
aeronautical education, which implies the need to know what you're
doing, if not from the outset, at least before first-flight.

And if that sounds slightly fey, as I'm sure it will to most of the
kit-assemblers, consider the other side of the coin: If the designer
provided you with detailed data, how would you know they were correct
without duplicating his calculations? Even then, weight -- that is,
ACTUAL weight -- is a critical factor in those calculations. A lot of
home-builts were designed by midgets for others of their kind and often
cite weights and g-factors that are wildly fallacious if not out-right
lies. Stuff a two hundred fifty pound lard-ass in the cockpit, use
real numbers and the calculations for some of the most popular designs
are liable to read 'Lawn Dart.'

Expecting the EAA to do something about your 'void' is wishful
thinking, in my opinion. Based on the advertisements and informercials
in their magazines, the EAA has no qualms about accepting money from
hucksters offering you everything from flying saucers to engines that
will rust out before they wear out.

I suggest the wiser course is to think for yourself If that requires
cracking a few books on airframe structural analysis, so be it. (Try a
search using 'fundamentals of aircraft structural analysis.' The books
are out there and fairly cheap, too -- apparently because nobody reads
them :-)

-R.S.Hoover