I'm Martin Gomez...airplane nut since birth. Also a husband and father of two girls. Born in Argentina, now a US citizen.

It's all my abuelo (grandfather) Isaac's fault. He used to take me to the airport fence in Buenos Aires. He would smoke his pipe, read his paper, and sip his coffee...I'd cling to the fence and watch the Caravelles and radial engine airliners roar overhead (OK, I'm dating myself!) The first books I read were about airplanes and flying.

I got my pilot license at about the same time I got my aeronautical engineering degree. A masters or two later, I started working at an airplane company. I've been building Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for about 13 years. One of our UAVs went to 60,000' powered by a prop. Another had the wingspan of a B-767, the weight of a Beech Baron, and the power of a C-172. Amazingly, I get paid to make airplanes! Not bad for a kid from the aiport fence.

Somewhere in there I took a detour to build science spacecraft for a few years. One of them, MESSENGER, is on its way to Mercury, and the other, STEREO, launched in 2006 to study the Sun and coronal mass ejections. That's three spacecraft and about ten UAVs flying...I just need to add one RV-7 to that collection and I'll be one happy American!

Unmanned machines are fun to design, build, and fly, but you can't take your kids to the beach in them, so it's either build a fast new little airplane or buy an old, slow one. For my money (all $80K of it!) it's no contest. Hmmm...aerobatics or corrosion? 170 kts or 120 kts? Easy choice.

Yeah, I have to do a lot of work, but it's kind of relaxing. My "real" work is very design-intensive and analytical, so getting my hands dirty at the end of the day is a blast. I call it "rivet therapy." A key benefit is that I get to build it to suit ME, not a marketeer's compromise designed to maximize sales. It just has to suit ME:

- It's a taildragger because that's what I got my license in and I miss being forced to fly well.

- It's a taildragger because my Walter Mitty fantasies have to do with Spitfires and Mustangs, not Sabres and Phantoms.

- It has a sliding canopy because it'll be easier to get my daughter Emma on board. She's disabled and will have to be lifted into the right seat.

- It's an aerobatic two-seater because I can always rent a cruising four-seater.

- It will have red brake pedals because it's a taildragger and I don't want my passengers stomping on a rudder pedal while we're on the ground.

- It will have decent cabin heat and useful cabin lighting.

Why do I think I can do this? Well, from 2000 to 2002, I got an M.S. degree in applied physics while working full time. My family put up with me, and I managed to do my job at the same time. I added it all up...it took about 1800 hours to go to class, do my homework, and study. It took about 2.5 years. I figure that's roughly the same time commitment required to build a homebuilt airplane. And riveting my elevators was WAAAAY more fun than quantum mechanics. I'm sure that my airplane will be better because I learned that hermitian operators have real eigenvalues!