Flying club RV-6a?

[hydroguy2]

I'm a Boardmember for my FlyingClub, A fellow flying club boardmember has asked about getting a RV-6a for our club. We have 70 members, all shared ownership of 5 planes(4 cessnas & citabria). The C-150 doesn't get many hours, even though it's only $31/hr wet. So it would be sold as seed money.
My questions:
1. Has anyone out there done this with an RV?
2. We carry liability only(everything is paid for) and self insure for hull. Any idea if insurance is available for a large group?, if so how much?
3. what else should the club think about?

I'm a big fan of the RV series. I think RV's are well designed and usually well built. BUT I must admit, I always thought of an RV as a more personal or possible 2-3partnership type plane. I never considered a RV as a good candidate for a large club. I view it as a very high performance plane which requires frequent flying to maintain currency. Our average pilot only logs 21hrs/yr, some log <10 and only a few log more than 50hrs/yr.

Whadda ya think?

[rv6ejguy]

A 6A is about as viceless as you get with a low wing aircraft which still has a real stall. Not demanding to fly any more than a Grumman Tiger. The landing gear will probably not tolerate knucklehead landings however, that would be the big worry. I really wouldn't consider an RV a high performance airplane in the normal sense ie. twitchy or nasty handing with a high stall speed or high sink rate.

The thing I'd see is maybe nobody would want to fly the other aircraft in your club anymore after sampling a real airplane!

[wingtime]

I served on the board of a smaller flying club. Your biggest hurdle would be the experimental part not the RV-6 itself. I think your insurance carrier along with your by-laws will be the key to success here.

I know we had insurance that was tailored for an ownership flying club such as yours and it was actually very reasonable. Our carrier required a copy of our by-laws and proof that each member was in fact an owner. (I think they just wanted to make sure we weren?t a front for a rental operation) Also we had strict aircraft checkout and currency rules for the higher performance aircraft. If you flew less than so many hours in a given time you were limited to the lower performance planes. Also we had a very good safety program in place. If you missed a safety meeting you had to make it up with a club instructor before you could fly.

Good luck!

[Bob Axsom]

Flying Club Members are not the general group of users you want for an RV-6A. If it lasted a year it would surprise me. I belonged to the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics - Huntington Beach Flying Club for many years and I leased my Archer to the club for several of those early years. The club had around 150 members and we flew out of John Wayne Orange County Airport in Santa Ana. The club did a lot of flying and everything was great until we got some new ego stimulating airplanes. A Mooney 201 and a Bonanza A36. One fellow that bad mouthed Cessna 172s was doing touch and goes on 19L when I flew home from work one evening. He bounced tried to recover, went off the runway and tore off the landing gear. Another pilot loaded 6 people into the A36 an took them to Catalina, which apparently went fine, but upon return he flared high and drove the landing gear up through the wings. In my volunteer capacity of plane captain for a year I saw first hand the difference between how owners treat their planes and how even well intending club members treat the planes they fly. After the 201 and A36 were crashed the insurance company refused further coverage and a decades old wonderful flying club came to an end.

I own an RV-6A that I love but it and a flying club would be a very bad mix in my opinion.

Bob Axsom