Pilot Pat Gonsoulin, 61, and his wife, Lynne, 52, of Bend, show off the Lancair Legacy two-seater kit plane that Pat just completed. It’s the fourth kit plane he’s built.

Pilot and plane builder Pat Gonsoulin and his wife, Lynne, push his 1,600-pound, cherry-red airplane out of its Redmond hangar at Lancair as he points out some modifications he’s made on his hand-built Lancair kit plane, which he just completed this month.

It’s truly been a labor of love that has kept Pat grounded in this hangar working on this single propeller Lancair plane almost every spare moment for 2½ years.

“I probably have a thousand hours into it. I worked on it after work and on the weekends and holidays,” explained Pat, running his hand along the sleek aircraft wing. “I start out loving the project, and then halfway through, I ask myself, ‘Why did I start this?’ But when it’s done, you realize it wasn’t so bad, and I’d do it again.”

And when Pat says “again,” he’s not joking; this is the fourth kit plane he’s built by himself.

What keeps Pat coming back time and time again building his own planes is that the kits keep getting better and better.

Consider that his new plane can easily cruise at 275 miles per hour and can reach altitudes of 22,000 feet, plus the plane’s airframe can take up to 9 G’s or nine times gravitational force; that’s more than astronaut John Glenn felt on his first ride into space.

“I’d say this is the Ferrari of planes for me,” said Pat with a chuckle. “It’s light on control; it has control harmony.”

Pat and his wife, who is also his co-pilot, have already taken the plane for its maiden voyage and have plans to fly it to Cali-fornia this weekend.

“Compared to the other planes he’s built, this one is larger and more comfortable,” said Lynne, a former flight attendant who knows her way around the plane’s instrument panel and throttle.

As for how much luggage they can take in this two-seater plane, Lynne jokes and says, “70 pounds of luggage for me and 30 pounds for Pat.”

Weight is a crucial component in a small plane, and interestingly enough, Pat was able to modify his landing gear enough to shed an extra 15 pounds of weight.

Building kits

For kit plane builders, it can become an obsession, warns Pat jokingly. He confesses his first two kit planes weren’t assembled in a hangar but in a barn.

With every plane he built, he says he gained more knowledge, and each new plane was built a little faster as he learned more.

“My first plane I built in 1974. It was an acrobatic wooden bi-wing with a fabric cover. I learned to stitch fabric with that one,” explained Pat. “Last I heard,that plane is still flying in Texas, owned by a former space shuttle astronaut.”

Pat, 61, a semiretired Lancair executive who was instrumental in bringing the company to Central Oregon from California, has been flying or working with aircraft throughout his life.

Though he has extensive knowledge of kit planes, also known as experimental planes, he says it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to build one.

He firmly believes anyone can build a safe kit plane, and he adds one doesn’t even need special equipment; just a good toolbox will do.

The Lancair Legacy kit plane comes complete with a 500-page manual, and if you happen to get confused, Pat says somebody at Lancair can always be consulted. Plus, there are several Internet chat rooms dedicated to home plane builders who often help each other out.

“The kit planes are really sophisticated today; most of the critical stuff is done for you,” explained Pat, whose Lancair kit plane cost $58,000. “With the kit plane, and we like to call them ‘custom-built planes,’ you’ll get the airframe, the wings and tires.”

The plane’s engine will run another $50,000.

If Pat were to sell his custom- built plane, he estimates he could get anywhere from $250,000 to $275,000, but he makes it clear that this plane is not for sale. This one he’d like to keep, though he wavers: “If I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, I could always build another one.”

The third plane Pat built was also one he had originally vowed not to sell, but he did get an offer he couldn’t refuse on that plane, from someone in Spain.

Revenue from the sale of that plane, according to Lynne, bought their home in Bend.

High-flying adventures

Pat became interested in airplanes when he was a young boy growing up in southern Louisiana, where his family ran a tugboat operation, which also used floatplanes.

Pat earned his pilot’s license when he was 18 and started flying the floatplanes for his family’s business.

Later he used his aircraft knowledge as an Army heli-copter crew chief in Vietnam.

After his military service, Pat returned to Louisiana and worked for the oil industry flying floatplanes out to the oil rigs.

“When the oil industry went bust, as it does — always there’s a boom and then a bust — I went to California and started working for Lancair. It was, and still is cutting edge, because it’s experimental. That’s always exciting,” said Pat. “We used to have coffee, and I remember drawing stuff on napkins and drafting parts. Lancair was the first to bring molded composite construction to kit planes. The Lancair kits went from working in the garage to really production-line quality.”

Because of his love of planes, Pat can’t quite break away into full retirement from Lancair and says he loves the research-and-development part of the experimental plane industry.

He envisions a time when Lancair will create not only composite crop-dusting planes but also floatplanes, which might be enough to entice him to sell his newly built Legacy plane.

“I’d have to say, I really enjoyed the float planes I flew in Louisiana. We’d spot schools of red fish, and I’d set her down and we’d catch-and-release for hours at a time. I always had my fishing rods with me in that float plane.”

But for now, Pat plans to make his way through the clouds and fulfill the rest of his aviator’s dream: to explore different parts of America.

With his newly built kit plane, he says he has the ability to set the plane down when he and his wife see something interesting on the horizon.