A Flyboy in the Making
by Scott Mills

"A bird is an instrument working according to a mathematical law. It lies within the power of man to make this instrument ... such an instrument fabricated by man lacks nothing but the soul of man."     Leonardo Da Vinci 

My love of all things aeronautical started developing at an early age. I have vague memories of playing around in our attic with line control planes that belonged to one of my older cousins. I didn’t know how to use them, but all you need when you’re young is a little imagination and some cool airplane noises.

Beginning at about age seven, my brother Steve and I started getting into model rockets. This was at the peak of the U.S. Space Program. At this time in my life, I knew for sure that I wanted to be an astronaut. After all, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was from my home town of Derry, New Hampshire. 

My parents gave me my first line control, a Cox PT-19, as a birthday gift when I was about 10. It wasn’t long before I started building my own LCs and flying them in the football field next to my house. It was here that I first heard other guys talking about RC models. My dad and I started researching them at hobby stores. It was at the 606 Hobby Store on South Willow Street in Manchester, NH that I met a guy named Dorian who offered to spend a few weekends teaching me the basics once my dad and I had built a plane. That was all it took to get me hooked. 

When I was 12 or 13, my dad and I built our first H-Ray trainer. Over the course of the next few years, we built and flew several bigger and faster models. At some point, I began entering and winning RC pattern competitions. Building and flying RCs were activities my dad and I enjoyed doing together til I graduated and became too cool for such things. We didn’t fly together again until I was married with kids and had moved to Florida where he and my mom would snowbird.

Becoming a pilot was something I was always interested in. I took some glider lessons as a teenager. After high school, I toyed with the idea of joining the military in order to become a pilot, but bad eyesight disqualified me from flying for Uncle Sam. It wasn’t until later in life that I would get serious about becoming a pilot. 

Around 1996 or so a buddy of mine (Richard Taylor) started talking about building his own kit plane—an RV, he called it. I had no idea what RV even stood for. It was around this same time that he and I started ground school together. I was intrigued by this idea of building your own plane and was happy to help Richard with his. While I knew that people did build their own planes, it wasn’t something I had really considered ... until then, at least. 

From this point on, building a plane was on my mind but not within my means financially. After getting my PPL, I rented blocks of flight time in a Cessna 150. I eventually sold our used Glasstron speedboat to buy a used KR2—not a popular decision with Deb and the kids. After some tweaking, this would be the plane I used for solo flying until we moved to Colorado in '98. I still rented the Cessna on occasion so I could take Deb or the kids up. In fact, the last flight I logged as PIC, from 1998 when we left Florida til 399A’s maiden flight, was in a 172 when I took my son and nephew up.

Taking the KR2 from Florida to Colorado just wasn’t practical for various reasons, so we sold it before "The Big Move, Part Duex." While flying was put on the back burner for the next 7 years, building would be only a couple of years away. 

With my job change came a salary increase that afforded me the luxury of being able to build. The next step was convincing my lovely wife that we needed to build an airplane. I don’t think she was ever convinced that a plane was something we needed or that I would ever actually finish building one, but she agreed anyway. 

In January of 2002, I started outfitting my two-car garage as a workshop and ordered my RV-9A tail kit soon after. The rest is, as they say, history!