Edwin L (Ted) French

I have been building airplanes since 1986. I do it as a hobby since I enjoy working in the shop. I am semi-retired after spending 26 years working at Northwood Pulp in Prince George. I hired on there as an Instrument Mechanic in 1974. In 1976 I went on staff as the shop foreman in the Instrument shop and worked in that capacity until 1992. I then transfered to Engineering as an Instrument Technologist. I am experienced in AutoCad and all the panel and wiring diagrams for my RV's are done in Cad.

I am happily married and have three grown daughters and three grandsons. Oh yes, and a cat. We go to our cabin on Stuart Lake when we want to "get away from it all". Or we will hook up our fifth wheel trailer and head out for parts unknown...Meet a friend of mine.

My shop is a double garage attached to our house in Kelowna. Built my RV-10 in the garage. It worked well with final assembly taking place in a hangar at the Kelowna airport.

The Avid flyer had folding wings so I kept it in the garage and towed it to the airport when it was time to fly. However, that was not an option when I built by first RV. I decided to complete the aircraft at home and trailer it to the airport when it was ready to fly since I did not have access to a hangar. You would not believe the number of permits and signatures that I had to get in order to get permission to do this. However it was done, and the airplane was trailered to the airport at 2:00 AM on a Thursday night. NEVER AGAIN. The poeple who you are sharing the road with at 2:00 AM are not the people you want to be avoiding a 23 ft wide load on city streets. We made it, but had two close encounters. When the second RV was nearing completion, I had access to a hangar so we took it to the airport in sections and did the final assembly there. Much less stress.

Prince George is a fine place to live. The main industry is the woods and there are many sawmills and several pulpmills in the area. The flying is very good in the summer, but is a bit more of a challenge in the winter. We get a fair bit of snow, and temperatures can go as low as -40 deg. Usually the winter temps are around -10 to 0 deg C. This means that if you do not have a heated hangar, and most of us don't, then either you need to have a heating pad in the oil sump which is powered at all times, as I do, or you need to preheat your engine before you fly. Since this can be quite time consuming, and since in Dec the daylight starts around 9:00 AM and stops around 4:00 PM, many airplanes stay parked through the winter. In the summer days start at 5:00 AM and stay till 10:00 PM so the flying time is very good. Hard to get any night practice in the summer.

We moved to Kelowna on the 1st of May 2004. I flew the RV-6A down a couple of weeks later. Sold the RV-6A and built an RV-10 which I have also sold.

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