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This is not some absurd thing. I fly an expirimental plane that I bought off of sombody who “built it themselves”. There’s an airshow every year in Wisconsin where about 10,000 aircraft fly in and a good chunk of those are expirimental. Aircraft kits are very very easy to build these days.
Yeah without.knowing more about the craft itself this is just a click bait headline.
Well, building your own plane exists for years, there is big communities and forums etc nowadays, but even in the 50s you were able to do it, buy kits, etc.
This gets more absurd every new story lol
right? the more that comes out about oceangate, the more baffled i am that this is a real company that actually generated revenue; i mean the context & details surrounding this story have become ironic enough to be almost cartoonish at this point. even the name of the company in itself seems like some sort of foreshadowing (well, if we’re going by past uses of the -gate suffix)
They weren’t a profitable company though, according to the late CEO. And the sub imploded on its 5th voyage.
Honestly, this kinda feels like a non-story. It’s not made explicit what this plane was, but some kit aircraft have been around for decades by many different people. There are something like 30k experimental aircraft licensed by the FAA. They’re statistically more dangerous, but “experimental” isn’t the same as “unregulated”. You still have to have them inspected by the FAA, including detailed build logs, clearly mark them as experimental, and you have to have them re-inspected every year. It’s a category that exists to make aviation more accessible, not an excuse to ignore all of the basic rules.
It’s not that surprising that a 2-seater would be an experimental aircraft, they’re common at that size. It’s certainly possible that he was flying a plane that he designed all on his own, but it’s more likely that he built a standard kit that was designed according to well established best-practices for aviation, and he definitely had to have a regulator take a look at it and say it was safe. It’s a completely different scenario than the Titan, where the only question was “can you get someone to agree to get in this thing”?
Stockton Rush is a killer and should be charged posthumously with four counts of negligent homicide. He’s just as culpable, if not more, that someone who gets behind the wheel drink and kills their passengers.
Quadruple homicide, that’s the death penalty right there. Oh, wait… Well, they could at least send his corpse to jail. Oh, wait…
Is charging someone posthumously with a crime even a thing in the USA? This question and answer suggest that only civil suits can be brought against the person’s estate posthumously, not criminal charges:
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/87138/can-someone-be-prosecuted-posthumously
Per the FAA registry he owned a Glasair III, which is hardly one of zanier kit planes one can own. The registry shows he’s had it since 1989, and this week’s Behind the Bastards mentioned he built a kit plane as his undergrad thesis project for aerospace engineering, so I’d guess this is that plane.
