The detailed program guide arrived after I’d signed the contract. I read it at my kitchen table, and somewhere around page five I felt the first flicker of something I couldn’t quite name. Not alarm. Not regret. Something quieter — the gap between what I’d imagined and what I was reading slowly coming into focus.
The program was structured around approximately fourteen working days of builder participation, spread across three or four scheduled visits to the factory in Torrance, California. I told myself that was a floor, not a ceiling. I was a retired with time, genuine preparation, and real intention to build. Surely there was room for more.
There wasn’t. Not really. And this post is about why.
The Many Ways to Build an Experimental
To understand what a factory build assist program is, you first need to understand what it isn’t — and that means stepping back through the full history of how Americans have built and certified experimental aircraft. That history is longer and richer than most people realize, and it maps almost perfectly onto a spectrum of builder involvement that still defines the choices available today.
Plans-Built: Where It All Began
Experimental amateur-built aviation in the United States has roots that trace to the earliest days of powered flight — the Wright brothers, after all, built their own airplanes. But the modern homebuilding movement took shape in the postwar period. By 1947, Congress officially approved the licensing of homebuilt aircraft, subject to a federally regulated inspection program, with the official justification being education and recreation. That government sanction was followed in 1953 by the founding of the Experimental Aircraft Association by Paul Poberezny and others. Craftsmen’s magazines ran cover stories about airplanes you could build in your garage, thousands of plans were sold, and a genuine subculture of builder-pilots took root.
In this era, building meant exactly that. You bought a set of engineering drawings, sourced raw materials — wood, fabric, steel tubing, hardware — and fabricated every part yourself from the ground up. The builder was engineer, fabricator, and assembler simultaneously. Build times measured in years, sometimes decades. The learning curve was steep and unforgiving, but what emerged at the end was an airplane you understood at a molecular level, because you had made every decision that shaped it.
Burt Rutan’s plans-built VariEze amazed the aviation world in 1975, soon followed by the larger Long-EZ, which set world records — with hundreds built and still flying today. The plans-built era produced some of the most innovative aircraft ever to fly, designed and built by passionate amateurs working in garages and hangars across the country. It also produced a very particular kind of builder — one who came away from the project knowing their airplane the way a surgeon knows anatomy.
Kit-Built: Democratizing the Build
The kit revolution changed everything. Frank Christensen’s Christen Eagle II biplane kit in the 1970s demonstrated that pre-engineered, pre-fabricated components could dramatically lower the barrier to entry without sacrificing the builder’s connection to their aircraft. Richard VanGrunsven founded Van’s Aircraft in 1973, beginning by selling plans and a few parts for the RV-3 from a small shop behind his house in Oregon. By the 1980s, the RV series had become the standard-bearer for kit-built aviation — accessible, high-performing, and backed by a passionate community.
The traditional kit builder receives pre-engineered, often pre-cut or pre-formed parts. The design decisions are made. But all the assembly is yours — in your garage, on your schedule, over however many years it takes. You pull thousands of rivets, route every wire, troubleshoot every fit issue. When something doesn’t line up, you figure out why, and in figuring out why, you learn something you’ll carry with you for the life of the airplane. The Van’s community even has a name for the outcome: the RV grin — that particular expression worn by someone who just flew a machine they built with their own hands.
Quickbuild Kits: Trading Hours for Money
As the kit aircraft market matured, a new question emerged: what if you could buy back some of the most labor-intensive time without surrendering the builder experience? Van’s began introducing partially completed quickbuild kits in the mid-1990s, which cut construction time by a third or half. Major structural assemblies — wing spars, fuselage frames, control surfaces — arrived substantially pre-riveted, assembled overseas by skilled craftsmen working from the same parts used in the standard kit.
What the quickbuild preserved, critically, was the builder’s ownership of the decisions that matter most. The structural skeleton was pre-assembled, but the systems integration — avionics, fuel, electrical, engine, interior — remained entirely with the builder. You might not have pulled every rivet in the wing skin, but you knew what was behind every panel because you worked around it, above it, and through it. The quickbuild builder trades hours and money for time, but they don’t trade away the knowledge that comes from living with a project through its full assembly sequence.
Build Assist Programs: A Spectrum Within a Spectrum
And then there are build assist programs — a category so broad it almost defies a single definition.
At one end sits the builder-centric model. The builder goes to a facility equipped with professional tools, jigs, and expertise. An experienced mentor works alongside them. The builder is there continuously, or nearly so — driving the pace, making the calls, accumulating real knowledge through repetition and problem-solving. Several members of my EAA chapter are deep into programs like this right now. What they describe sounds much closer to a well-supported traditional kit build than to anything else. They are building their airplanes. The facility is helping them do it well.
At the other end sits the factory-centric model — of which the Sling Custom Builds program is a clear example. The factory is the primary constructor, operating on a production schedule optimized for quality and throughput. The builder participates in defined windows, scheduled around the factory’s timeline. The airplane is built to a professional standard because professionals are doing most of the work. The builder gains hands-on exposure to every major system and contributes meaningfully to documented tasks. But the center of gravity is the production floor, not the builder’s learning curve.
Both ends of this spectrum are legitimate. Both produce excellent airplanes. Both serve real needs. But they are not the same experience, and they are not designed for the same person — and that distinction matters enormously before you write a check.
📚 Required Reading
The Propeller Under the Bed: A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft
Eileen A. Bjorkman — University of Washington Press
If the history of experimental aviation in this post sparked your curiosity, Eileen Bjorkman’s book will feed it properly — and then some.
The story at its heart is deceptively simple: on July 25, 2010, Bjorkman’s 82-year-old father Arnold Ebneter took off from Paine Field in Everett, Washington, to set an aviation world record in an airplane he had designed himself and built in his garage. The 2,300-mile non-stop flight took eighteen hours. The preparation took fifty years.
But what Bjorkman does with that story is something else entirely. She is a daughter writing about her father, and that relationship breathes through every page. There is a moment she describes early in the book that stops you cold — the realization, at twenty years old, that her father was once young too, with his own hopes and dreams. It’s the kind of quiet, specific observation that only a child watching a parent can make, and it opens up everything that follows.
Bjorkman — herself a pilot and aeronautical engineer — frames her father’s journey from teenage airplane enthusiast to Air Force pilot and Boeing engineer against the rise, near extermination, and ongoing revival of homebuilt aircraft in the United States. The history of the movement and the history of one family are woven together so naturally that you stop noticing the seams. The propeller that gave the book its title spent years stored under her parents’ bed, moved from base to base across a military career — a dream deferred, never abandoned, always present. That image alone tells you everything about what this book is really about.
As one reviewer noted, your heart will race when you watch Ebneter’s design take flight for the first time — because Bjorkman makes you feel it the way she felt it, as a daughter watching her father reach for something he had carried his entire life.
For anyone who has ever wondered what drives a person to spend years building an airplane in a garage, this book is the answer. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and quietly moving.
I had the privilege of knowing Eileen through our EAA chapter, where she served as president. The book carries the same quality she brought to everything aviation — precise, warm, and deeply informed.
Available through the University of Washington Press and wherever books are sold.
My Sling, My Build — Expectations and Reality
When I decided to build a Sling TSi, I had choices. But they were more constrained than they might appear on paper.
A traditional kit build — even a quickbuild — typically takes someone with my level of experience three to four years from first rivet to first flight. I’m 59. That math has a certain weight to it. Every year in the build is a year not flying the airplane I’m building. Beyond time, there’s the practical reality of space and tooling: a proper build environment requires a dedicated shop and specialized equipment — an infrastructure investment that makes sense across multiple builds, but hard to justify for a single airplane that you’re unlikely to repeat. This was going to be my airplane, built once, flown for years. I needed a path that respected that reality.
The Sling Custom Builds factory assist program in Torrance offered something genuinely appealing for someone in my situation: a fixed price, a known completion timeline, professional quality, and a structure specifically designed to involve the owner throughout the build. I signed up. Committed. The detailed program documentation arrived afterward — and reading it, I’ll admit, gave me a moment of pause. The structure was more defined and more constrained than I’d imagined. But I’d committed, and I told myself what most optimistic builders tell themselves: that the documentation represented a minimum, not a ceiling. That as a motivated builder who wanted to be more involved, I would find a way to extend my contribution well beyond the fourteen days on paper.
To back that intention with something real, I spent the months before my first visit preparing. I attended EAA build workshops to develop hands-on skills from scratch. I completed Rotax engine training and earned my certification. I was retired, my schedule was flexible, and I was genuinely ready to spend extended time in Los Angeles if the program would absorb that investment. I wanted to build this airplane.
The Gap Between Minimum and Ceiling
What I discovered — over multiple visits, through repeated attempts to engage more deeply — is that the gap between the documented minimum and any meaningful ceiling was narrower than I’d hoped, and the path to closing it was harder than I’d anticipated.
The issue wasn’t my availability. It was the program’s orientation. Doing meaningful work on an aircraft under construction requires two things that are genuinely difficult in a factory setting: direction from someone who knows what needs doing next, and proactive thinking from the team about where a willing builder can be plugged in. Both require the factory to treat the builder as an asset to be integrated rather than a schedule item to be managed. In my experience, that integration was largely absent.
When I asked to contribute beyond my assigned tasks, I was often told that a particular piece of work had already been completed, or that it would be handled by the team. The assigned tasks themselves were narrow and defined. There didn’t appear to be a plan — not in a malicious sense, but in a practical one: the factory is running a production operation across multiple aircraft simultaneously, and building a bespoke participation path for each individual builder is genuinely difficult work that the program doesn’t seem structured to support. As a new apprentice, I needed direction and supervision to do anything useful. Without a proactive plan from the factory to provide that, the ambition to contribute more simply had nowhere to land.
There were moments, across multiple visits, that brought this into focus. The difficulty of scheduling visits in the first place — coordinating around a production timeline I wasn’t privy to. Arriving to find work completed that I’d hoped to be part of. The quiet but persistent sense that my presence, however well-intentioned, was something the factory was accommodating rather than welcoming.
One moment stands in for many. My family was in Las Vegas for winter break when I got word that my Sling was entering the finishing and rigging phase — avionics, interior, propeller, wings. I left my family at the hotel and drove five hours to Los Angeles through an unseasonable rainstorm. I arrived to find the avionics already installed, the propeller on. By pure luck — minutes, literally — I caught the panel before it was closed. I snapped a few photos of my avionics stack. Then it was sealed, and I stood there for the first power-on of my airplane’s electronics.
It was a real moment. I’m glad I was there for it. But I had trained for this, cleared my schedule for this, driven through a rainstorm for this. And what I got was a few photos and a lucky minute.
That experience wasn’t the exception. It was representative of a program that is, at its core, designed to deliver a finished Sling to someone who wants to own one — with a builder participation layer built around that primary goal. The document I received after signing describes it accurately. What it doesn’t quite prepare you for is what that feels like when you came because you wanted to build an airplane.
👀 Watch the Videos — But Watch Them Carefully
If you’re researching the Sling Custom Builds factory assist program, you will almost certainly find your way to YouTube. The content there is genuinely worth watching — well-produced, enthusiastic, and full of detail about the Sling TSi build process. Just bring a calibrated eye.
Aviation101 — Josh Flowers, a pilot and filmmaker with a substantial following and Chelsea Smith (A&P, pilot, and Josh’s fiancee)— documented their Sling TSi factory build in a multi-week video series that became something of a reference point for prospective builders. The production quality is excellent, the access is remarkable, and watching it, you get a vivid picture of what the build process looks like. What’s worth noting is that the level of access and involvement shown in that series reflects an experience that comes with being a content creator with a large audience and an existing relationship with the factory. It is not a standard customer experience. It’s a collaboration that happens to also be a build. Both things are true simultaneously, and the videos are valuable for that reason. Just don’t use them as a preview of your own experience.
The factory’s own social media channels feature a steady stream of happy customers — smiling owners standing next to gleaming new Slings, brief testimonials about how smooth the process was and how thrilled they are with the airplane. These are real people and real reactions. But look closely at the language. What you’ll hear, almost universally, is the joy of ownership — the excitement of flying, the quality of the finished aircraft, the professionalism of the team. What you’ll hear less often is the language of building — the satisfaction of a problem solved, a system understood, a skill developed. That’s not an accident. It’s a reflection of who the program is genuinely designed to serve.
None of this makes the content misleading in any deliberate sense. It’s a natural expression of what the program delivers and who tends to be happiest with it. But if you’re watching those videos hoping to see a preview of your own builder journey, you may be watching the wrong story.
The right story is one you’ll need to find in a hangar conversation — with someone who went through the program, who has the airplane and the perspective, and who has had enough time between the build and the telling to be completely honest about both.
Reflections on the Other Side
With the airplane built and waiting for its first flight, I find myself in a reflective place. Not bitter — the Sling TSi sitting in my hangar is real, and it will fly. But thoughtful. These are the questions I’ve been sitting with, and the honest answers I’ve arrived at.
Is my plane better quality than if I’d built it myself at home?
Almost certainly yes — and I say that without reservation. The Sling Custom Builds team has built many of these airplanes. They know the common mistakes, the fit issues, the tolerances that matter. The community feedback on factory-assist Slings is consistently positive in terms of build quality and finish. An experienced team building an airplane they’ve built dozens of times will, on average, produce a more consistent result than a first-time builder working through the learning curve in a home shop.
I haven’t flown mine yet, so I can’t speak from the left seat. But based on everything I’ve observed and everything I’ve heard from others in the Sling community, I have genuine confidence in the airworthiness of what was built in Torrance.
The more interesting question isn’t whether the airplane is well-built. It’s whether I know it well enough. And the honest answer is: not yet. I don’t have the intuitive familiarity with my own aircraft’s systems that a garage builder develops through years of intimate contact with every wire run and every rivet. That’s a gap I intend to close deliberately — through my own condition inspections, through maintenance, through the kind of hands-on learning with the finished airplane that I didn’t get enough of during the build. The repairman certificate I hold is an opportunity, not just a credential. I plan to earn it in practice, not just on paper.
Would I go through the Airplane Factory Build Assist Program knowing what I know today?
No. Not this specific program.
The reasons I chose it remain valid — the time constraints of building at home, the space and tooling requirements, the realistic math of a three-to-four year garage build at my stage of life. Those haven’t changed. Factory assist was the right category of solution for my situation.
But I would have done more homework on the specific program before committing. The detailed program documentation that describes the builder’s role arrived after I had already signed. Reading it before committing would have given me pause — not because it’s misleading, but because it describes a structure considerably narrower than what I’d imagined. I assumed the fourteen days was a minimum, not a ceiling. I was wrong about that.
I would have gone looking for a build assist program oriented around the builder rather than around the production floor. Programs where the builder’s presence is continuous rather than scheduled, where the shop is a resource rather than a constructor. They exist — I know builders in my EAA chapter living that experience right now — and for someone who came as prepared and as available as I was, one of those programs would have served me far better.
What the Airplane Factory program does well is worth acknowledging honestly. The supply chain coordination is seamless — vendors like Midwest Panel Builders and Airmaster were integrated without any burden falling on me. I never dealt with a shipping crate, a storage problem, or a tool I didn’t have. The team’s experience with the Sling platform is real and deep, and the finished airplane reflects that. I just wish I’d had more of a hand in building it.
Would I still build a Sling TSi?
Without hesitation, yes.
The airplane itself is everything I hoped for. The Sling TSi is a modern, capable, beautifully designed aircraft — IFR-capable, Rotax-powered, Garmin-equipped, with a fit and finish that puts most production aircraft to shame at a fraction of the certified price. The experimental category gives me the freedom to fly it the way I want and maintain it the way I choose. The Sling community is active and supportive. None of that has changed.
The platform was the right choice. The path to it was more complicated than I expected.
What would I tell someone standing where I was two years ago?
Find someone who has been through the program. Not someone who is marketing it, not someone whose experience you’ve seen on YouTube — someone who will sit down with you over coffee and tell you what it actually felt like from the inside. Ask them specifically: how much time did you spend on the airplane? What tasks did you do? How did the coordination work? Did you feel like a builder or a customer? Listen carefully to how they answer, not just what they say.
The Airplane Factory does genuinely impressive work with social media and YouTube. The content is well-produced, enthusiastic, and shows the best version of what the experience can look like. If you consume it uncritically — as I largely did — you will form an idealized picture of your own participation that the program may not fully deliver. That’s not deception. It’s marketing. The responsibility for calibrating your expectations is yours, and the best way to calibrate them is through unfiltered conversations with people who have already been through it.
Am I a builder?
When someone at the airport asks me this question — and they will — I find myself choosing my words carefully.
I am not a builder in the way the kit experimental community means it. I don’t have the scar tissue, the hard-won intuition, or the thousands of hours of garage time that the word implies when a kit builder uses it. I couldn’t tell you from memory where every wire in my airplane runs, because I didn’t run them. That’s a real thing to acknowledge.
But I am something meaningful: a deeply informed airplane owner who understands his aircraft’s systems, knows its history, and is committed to developing the hands-on relationship with it that the build process didn’t fully provide. I will hold a repairman certificate for this airframe. I intend to use it. The learning that should have happened in Torrance will happen in my hangar instead, on my schedule, on my terms.
Maybe that’s a different kind of builder. A slower one. One who starts where most builders finish.
I’ll take it.
Slingology - Building and Flying a Sling TSi 
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