DECISION PROCESS
Why Build a Plane?
If you want to fly an airplane you basically have 3 options; you can rent, buy, or build. After giving each option a lot of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that building it is the best option for a number of reasons. Renting a plane is by far the cheapest and most hassle free option. However, 
rental planes are normally 50 year old spam cans and its hard to rent a plane that can fly upside down. On top of that, renting anything just isn’t my style.
Buying an airplane is in my opinion the worst option. It just doesn’t make economic sense. The airplanes that are on the market today are either 40 years old and incredibly overpriced, or new and incredibly overpriced. Any maintenance required must also be done by an expensive A&P mechanic. If 
you want an airplane that can cruse above 180mph, carry two people, and fly upside down, you are basically left to choose between the high priced composite aerobatic planes. Unfortunately I don’t have $150,000 lying around to spend on a plane; perhaps only 50-60 large spread out over 4 years. This brings me to my reasoning for building a plane. The homebuilt kits available today have far better performance than all but a few commercially available planes. For about $50,000 you can
have a plane that can run with a quarter million dollar Cirrus and offer the aerobatic performance of a $130,000 Super Decathlon. They also require a minimum initial outlay of cash and they have lower maintenance costs. And finally the main reason for building a plane: because building a plane is f#$@ing cool.
Timing
I spent a lot of time trying to rationalize spending so much time and money on an airplane at such a young age. So I thought about it like this: If you wait for all the lights to turn green before you drive to work then you’ll never get to work. In other words, if I wait to to have enough money to build a plane then there's a good chance I wont have the time to build a plane. This isnt to say I plan on going into debt while building this plane. I am commited to making this a pay as you go project. I also remember my dad telling me to get all my toys before I get married. Everything pointed to building a plane now, while Im young and have enough free time to work on this huge project.
Choosing a Plane
So now that I’ve subscribed to building a plane its time to choose a model. I wanted something that can cru
se above 150mph, fly upside down, have one or two
seats, and can bebuilt for about $60,000. I also wanted a well
known kit with lots of builder support. After painfully eliminating the
hot composite kits because they were way beyond my piloting
skills and budget, I was left with the vans RV series. Check them
out at www.vansaircraft.com. My final decision was between the
RV-3 and RV-8. They both have that cool fighter cockpit feel that
I fell in love with while flying gliders. Performance is about the
same, the major difference is that the RV-3 only has one seat and
costs much much less. While I would really like 2 seats, I just
cant afford an RV-8 right now. If I chose to build an 8 then I would have to put an IO-360 in it with a constant speed prop and some hitec avionics and the list goes on. So it looks like ill be building an RV-3.