Rutan Symposium Turns to the Coming Canard Maintenance Crisis

The Rutan Aircraft Flying Experience held its annual Future of Rutan Designs Symposium on Wednesday, July 22, at Forum Stage 9. This year the organizers set aside the celebration for a working problem and named it directly: the coming canard maintenance crisis.

The concern is one the Rutan community has watched approach for years. The designs that came out of Mojave, the VariEze, Long-EZ, Cozy, Defiant, and their descendants, were built by their owners, and those builders carried the knowledge to maintain them. As airplanes change hands, a growing number of canards now belong to owners who did not build them and cannot fall back on the builder’s understanding of a composite, moldless airframe. At the same time, the pool of technicians who know how to work on these aircraft is thinning.

The symposium addressed both halves of that gap. Organizers lined up guest speakers from the canard maintenance industry to help the audience understand what the future holds for non-builder owners, and where the next generation of canard maintenance technicians will come from. Those are the right questions. A homebuilt design succeeds when it flies; it endures when someone can still repair it two owners later.

The session was led by Ryszard Zadow, founder and board member of the Rutan Aircraft Flying Experience, the organization that has taken on the job of keeping Rutan designs flying and connecting the owners who fly them. RAFE runs the symposium each year at AirVenture as a gathering point for a community that is national and, by the nature of its airplanes, closely knit.

For the canard owner at Oshkosh this week, particularly one who bought rather than built, the Wednesday afternoon forum was a practical stop. The subject matter, e.g., who signs off the work and who trains the next mechanic, is the kind that determines whether an airframe stays airworthy over the long run.