Dana soloed at 16 and has been messing around with the low and slow side of aviation ever since. An aerospace engineer by education and mechanical engineer by trade, he’s been taking things apart almost since birth and usually manages to put them back together again. He’s owned and tinkered with a variety of homebuilts over
the years and currently flies a Hatz CB-1 biplane.
While I owned my Fisher FP-404 (“Restoring a Stored Homebuilt,” February 2017), I was using an Android smartphone running the free Avare navigation app...
Ultimate experimenter Paul Lipps has used his own homebuilt, a Lancair 320, as a test bed for his many innovations, which include reflexed flaps, an ultra-long pitot tube for more accurate readings, a solar-powered fan for the cockpit, a cowl scoop for ultra cooling of the magneto, extremely close clearances between the spinner and the prop, and a one-of-a-kind propeller.