Striving to be the person my dog thinks I am.

Mike Richter is a Santa Barbara, California-based designer and kit manufacturer of innovative, high performance model sailplanes.  I’m at the stage where I’m striving to make things simpler, rather than more complicated, and it looks like Mike’s design philosophy is to take the simplest possible approach to building and flying.  When I saw Mike’s Alula design with its cleverly swept forward wing, I was sold.  I’ve never noticed it before, but the forward sweep on the wing is precisely the way raptors configure their wings in soaring flight – check out the logo, above.  What’s not to love about that?

I received one of the earlier kits, having put my name on the waiting list fairly early on.  It arrived a month or two ago, and for not a lot of great reasons, it has taken this long to get it out of the box and assembled.  Although there’s very little work to do, it was when I was working through the building steps it occurred to me a blog documenting the flight testing and subsequent flights would be useful for me and others.  Other Alula builders – or just those interested in the subject material in general – are welcomed and encouraged to participate with comments, which can be entered in response to any post.  It’s worth noting I’m not affiliated with Dream-Flight in any way, other than being a paying customer — and a fan.

To kick things off with this first, introductory post, what I won’t do is try and document my steps in building the Alula.  Suffice to say the kit is extremely well engineered, and Mike’s building instructions are very complete.  So long as you follow them to the letter, you will do just fine.  I made the mistake of skipping a step or two toward the end, and I ended up paying for it.  More on that in the next post, where I document my first attempts to fly the Alula.  ‘Til then, check out Mike’s Alula Uplift on YouTube.