This is a picture of the airplane that I own today. It is called an RV-4 and it is classified as "experimental."  This basically means that it came in a box and had to be assembled. If you think I am joking, I'm not. I didn't build it though. I bought it from a guy out in Chicago that spent 3 years putting it together in his garage. You really need to have a lot of trust in someone to buy an experimental airplane from them. But he seemed like a nice enough guy, so I took faith and flew it back here to California.

    Buying an airplane is not as difficult as most people would think. It is actually much easier than buying a car from some idiot, blood-sucking salesman. Really all you do is look the plane over, decide what you would be willing to pay, make an offer and hopefully come to some agreement with the owner, then fill out a bill of sale. It literally takes 15 minutes. Well, that is all it took me. Maybe I screwed up. But my plane has been great and I have flown it all over the country. And as far as price goes, about the same as a BMW. I'd much rather have the plane.

    You may have already seen my plane in Senseless Acts of Video or the IMAX movie Wild California.  If not, try to check these out, especially the IMAX flick, because it is awesome. Some really cool things about my plane are that it is fully aerobatic (loops, rolls, spins, hammerhead stalls, all the good stuff), weighs only 900 lbs. (much less than a car), flies at about 190 mph, and runs on car gas. Yep, that's right, good 'ole 87 octane straight from the pump. Most airplanes need aviation fuel which is really expensive. But not me. I go to the gas station and fill up a few 5 gallon cans and just empty them into the wing tanks on my plane. I can go 750 miles on one fill-up. Not bad. There are some bad things about my plane though. It only fits two people and is pretty cramped. Also, it has a very basic carburetor fuel system, so when I do some high performance aerobatics the engine will actually quit from fuel starvation. I just make sure I do that stuff near a place where I can make an emergency landing.

    I mainly use my plane for sport flying. It is uncomfortable to stay in it longer than 2 hours, so I don't go long distances (except when I brought it back from Chicago, which took 13 hours and really sucked because I still didn't know how to fly it that well). I like to do aerobatics and cruise around the islands out here. Canyon flying is probably the most fun of all. It definitely gives you that "Star Wars" feeling. Low and fast is the way to go, in my opinion. To anybody that gets stoked reading any of this, my best advice is to get your pilot license. You can use it forever and will never regret it.