A Garage Aviator

Ken Boyd of Baileys Harbor says that for every guy who is successful in completing an airplane in his garage, there are 10 others whose garages hold dusty stacks of half-assembled wings, fuselages and canopies. Ken’s aircraft, on the other hand, has flown for more than 50 hours (anyone for lunch on Mackinac Island?) and resides in its own hangar at the Ephraim-Gibraltar Airport.

His love of flying began at about kindergarten age. Although his family in Streator, Ill., wasn’t wealthy, his dad owned a 1946 two-seater Aeronca Chief. “We didn’t take vacations,” Ken says. “That airplane was the family hobby.”

Ken Boyd with his plane. Photo by Len Villano.

His younger brother, Jim, became a United Airlines captain, while Ken’s career took him on a different path. For 30 years he was president and CEO of Family Resources, a social services agency in Davenport, Iowa.

But as soon as he finished graduate school in 1963, he bought a 1961 two-seater Piper Colt. “I didn’t have a pilot’s license yet,” he recalls. “I hadn’t even taken a single flying lesson, but I knew I was going to make it happen.”

A few years later, he upgraded to a 1968 Piper Cherokee 140, but by 1970 he gave up flying to concentrate on his career and his growing family – wife, Carol, and children, Doug and Kate.

After retiring in 1996, the Boyds began spending winters in Florida and visiting their daughter in Indianapolis and their son in Sydney, Australia. By 2003, Doug had become interested in building his own plane. As a Christmas gift, he paid for his parents to go with him to a two-day workshop on aviation construction.

“We learned how to rivet and bend metal, and I realized I had the skills to do those things,” Ken says. He and his brother had already been attending the EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) AirVenture Convention and Fly-In in Oshkosh for several years, and once the idea of building and piloting his own plane was in his head, Ken started looking for the perfect model at EAA conventions.

The kit he decided on was a S-19 Venterra, produced by RANS Designs in Hays, Kansas.

(Experimental aircraft, by the way, are not a science-fiction type of plane, as the name might suggest. Rather, the term refers to amateur-built planes, as distinguished from commercially produced aircraft that are known as “certified” planes, whose specifications must be strictly adhered to throughout the production of the model. For this reason, experimental planes often reflect newer designs and technology.)

Ken began work on his plane in his garage in the spring of 2008. The sections – tail, wings, fuselage, canopy, firewall, interior, engine (a Rotax 912 ULS built in Austria) and propeller – arrived one by one in huge crates over a period of years. Sometimes they accumulated faster than Ken had time to assemble them. 

“There were times, I had parts under our bed,” he says. “I told Carol that the next plane I build will go faster, and she laughed and said, ‘I’m sure your next wife will enjoy that!’”

Thousands of dollars went into special tools – “the kind I couldn’t find at Nelson’s,” Ken notes.

When the project outgrew his two-and-a half-stall garage, he bought an outdoor shelter for it.

The work and the study that preceded each step of the process took a long time. Ken started to log the hours he worked on the plane, but soon stopped trying to keep track. 

“There were thousands of individual parts and probably about 2,000 hours of work,” he says.

For example, he spent 10 weeks painting each section before the plane was assembled. Each piece required four coats of special paint ($400 a gallon) applied 10 minutes apart.

Four-and-a-half years after he began work, the little Venterra, weighing just 817 pounds, took to the air on Oct. 27, 2012. Before that, Ken had had to renew his pilot’s license – “something that gives one pause when you haven’t flown in 40 years” – but as soon as he was in the cockpit it was like he had never stopped flying. The plane performed perfectly during the 40-hour test period required to receive its airworthy certificate and is now being enjoyed by the Boyds and friends.

The aircraft burns about five gallons of fuel an hour and has a range of 500 miles, cruising at 130 mph. Its registration number is N39KB, representing Ken’s initials and the year he was born.

He is full of praise for Dale Jorgensen of Algoma, who was his technical adviser during the years the plane took shape, and for the Ephraim-Gibraltar Airport, where he’s part of the “friends” group that supports the facility.

“Ambulance planes can land here,” he says, “and we have a van, two rental cars and eight bicycles for use by people who fly in. It is a great boost to tourism. Every May we hold Young Eagles Day, a nationwide EAA program that provides free plane rides and lunch for youngsters and their parents. This year, 96 local kids participated. We also send kids to the Young Eagles Air Academy in Oshkosh.”

And what of Doug Boyd, whose interest in building his own plane started his dad on this adventure? The tail of his plane-to-be is hanging in his living room in Sydney.