Plane hobby is labor of love

Dennis Martin loves to fly. And it shows.

Just pay a visit to his home in northeast Provo and behold the wings and fuselage of a small airplane that rests inside the garage and the adjacent, canopied carport. All in all, this makeshift outdoor hangar looks like a small-scale Boeing plant.Buying a finished plane costs thousands of dollars more than building one from a kit, as Martin is doing. But saving money is not the only reason he decided two years ago to jump headlong into this summer project.

"There's joy in building it yourself," said Martin, a BYU communications professor. "It's not work, it's fun."

Still, Martin realized he was in for a major chore the day the airplane kit material arrived at his home. "You feel like you're starting the biggest model airplane project of your life," he said.

"I opened the box and thought, `Can I really do this?' "

The 8-by-8 box, which came via truck, contained the components of the Velocity 173. "The bishop is using the box as a storage shed," he said.

When his summer hobby is completed, projected to be sometime next year, Martin plans to take to the skies in his "home-built" plane, a four-seat aircraft that has the ability to make a 1,000-mile cross-country trip at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour and at an altitude between 7,000 and 12,000 feet.

The twin-tail plane, made of composites - fiberglass and carbon fiber - has a wingspan of 31 feet and a length of 19 feet.

Naturally, the sight of a plane in a garage has attracted significnt attention in the neighborhood. "Everybody's interested in it - my family, neighbors, the mailman," Martin said.

For him, this hobby is the marriage of his love of flying and his profession. Martin travels frequently, as he attends international conferences and makes consulting trips to major universities around the country. The craft will enable him to fly to his destinations without having to rent a plane. And it will be tax-deductible, too.

The cost of the Velocity kit and the engine Martin purchased is about $33,000, and by the time it's finished, he estimates he will have put in about $60,000 (with financial help from a silent partner) and about 1,000 hours of labor.

Now that school is back in session, however, he works on the plane only on weekends. Later this fall, he will mothball the aircraft and have it hangared at the Provo airport until next spring.