RV-10 Fullerton CA Jan 2 2025

[Colonel]

The door simply came off. This airplane was flyable.



Bobby lost a canopy on takeoff in an L39 one day. Because he's not a Good Canadian™ he didn't panic or crash, but instead just drove around the pattern and landed. He said it was a little breezy.

We drove around in the R44 afterwards all over the departure end of the runway, but we never found the canopy. Weird. No big loss really, it would probably have been pretty bashed up. But it would have been cool to bolt to the hangar wall, I guess.

[Slick Goodlin]

I’m guessing he was terrified that if the door came all the way off it would wipe out his tail. Maybe misguided but I think the -10 does have a little history of that.

Such a shame that he had the service letter (or whatever isn’t an AD) recommended secondary latch kit at home ready to go on.

[Colonel]

RV is NOT a certified aircraft. Isn't there an "experimental" somewhere in its airworthiness?

It's reasonable to expect experimental aircraft to break, because certified sure do all the time.

When that happens, the pilot had better be prepared to fly a broken aircraft.

Am I missing something?

[Slick Goodlin]

RV is NOT a certified aircraft… Am I missing something?

Not at all, but Vans and the other big kit makers do issue notices to owners when better methods are found. I don’t know if the lawyers have gotten involved in the exact nomenclature which is why I didn’t call it an AD.

The reality is Vans has determined the latch as designed does have some weakness to it, I believe in the way a latched door is indicated but don’t quote me. In this case they said it should be addressed before the next flight, but as an experimental-amateur built that’s just a suggestion.

So what do we do with this? I have a non-RV homebuilt that has an issue that would be 100% no-bueno on a certified aircraft but I have a temporary procedure to deal with it until I get my crap together and fix it properly. I think that’s really the answer here and it’s what the big airframers do: they find a problem and if it can be mitigated in the meantime they instruct you to do that. No reason a homebuilt should be any different, but if I were flying an unmodified RV-10 I’d at least want a second way to know those doors are really latched, preferably something mechanical.

It kind of begs the question as to whether the tail should be tested for a door strike up to Vne on something like that. Probably not but where do you draw the line? I think the Adam A500 had to have a propeller blade thrown through a tail boom to demonstrate the tail wouldn’t come off and make an already bad day so much worse when it was certified. Shame they only sold like four of the things after all that effort.