We're Famous

The article in AOPA mag came out last week about the Sportsman 2+2, the
cover pic is also of this area. AOPA hired a local photographer for this
story. We spent a day and a half with the AOPA writer and the owner of the
plane. The plane looks nice but it won't do what a 182 will do so I don't
understand why you'd bother to build one. They list a 350 foot takeoff,
which is ridiculous. It takes longer than that for the tailwheel to get off
the ground. The picture on page 75 is an example. After more than a
thousand foot run he is only one foot in the air. What you can't see is
that 5 feet in front of the plane is water, the photographer is standing in
the water. You should see the photographer laugh as the plane goes by, not
what we expected the scene to be at all. I have that takeoff and 30 other
minutes of video. He almost wrecked the plane three times while they did
the story, it's always fun to get a flatlander out here with a little
density altitude. That Cub belongs to one of the controllers I work with,
the one mentioned in the story. All in all it was an interesting couple of
days.

Always glad to see yet another rec.aviator become famous. :-)

Newps wrote:

The plane looks nice but it won't do what a 182 will do so I don't
understand why you'd bother to build one.

Well, I'm grateful to AOPA for doing the article. I saw an ad for the plane in Sport
Aviation and checked it out on the web site. It looked pretty good there. The Pilot
article made me aware that the payload isn't really any better than my Maule and the
back seats are only good for midgets. For some reason, that didn't sink in from the
web site information. I'm back to hankering for a Bearhawk.

George Patterson
None of us is as dumb as all of us.