Joe Dubner's Airplane Stuff

My Airplane

My airplane is a Long-EZ, a canard pusher designed by Burt Rutan in the late 1970s. Mine was built from plans (not a kit) and finished in 1997. In spite of its 30-year-old design, it is as fast and economical as any of today's homebuilts (and much more so than any certificated model of similar horsepower).

For more information on the breed, read about it here.

The airplane page is a personal corner of the site, a place where the owner's aviation life is documented in plain detail rather than polished marketing language. It introduces a canard pusher aircraft of Burt Rutan's design, built from plans and finished in the mid-1990s, and treats the machine as a working companion rather than a trophy. Even a design of that vintage is described as quick and economical compared with many of today's homebuilt projects, which is the kind of affectionate, factual tone that runs through the whole site. Photographs of taxiing, flight, and the instrument panel follow, giving the reader a sense of the aircraft in use rather than on a display ramp.

Beneath the photographs sits a compact technical section listing aircraft details, starting with the model and its origin as a canard pusher from the late 1970s, along with how the aircraft was constructed. The presence of a detailed panel description suggests an ongoing interest in avionics and instrument upgrades, and the homepage's mention of propellor design work, altitude encoders, serial and parallel converters, and electronic flight displays points to a hands-on, tinkering approach. Projects of this kind often grow out of real flying: a gauge that misreads, a data line that needs translating, a display that has to be coaxed into working reliably in the air rather than on the bench.

The surrounding pages expand the same interests into broader territory. A photograph of a fighter aircraft in the skies, an airshow visit, and a mountain air base appear elsewhere on the site, along with notes about a hangar, a camera, a solar-powered setup, and a dog that turns up in family snapshots. The keywords also point to amateur radio, position reporting, and GPS tracking, all part of the same technical curiosity. Tying it together is the site's stated persona, a gentleman at leisure since 1999, whose pages mix forward address information, gentle link lists, and careful housekeeping notes about what has been updated, added, or cleaned up along the way.