Maben had been conducting tests of the A700 on the ground, gradually barreling down the runway at higher and higher speeds. But he'd always stopped at the end of the airstrip. He was getting a feel for the engines, the brakes, and the flight controls.
The A700 team knew that the first flight could take place at any time, but it's up to the pilot to determine when he and the plane are ready for it. On one of his high-speed runs, at around 2 p.m., instead of slowing to a stop, Maben pulled back on the control stick and lifted the A700 into a smooth takeoff. He climbed up to 15,000 feet and stayed aloft for just under an hour. A few minutes later, Maben called Wilding from the cockpit on a cell phone. "Congratulations, you're a dad," Maben said. "The thing is perfect. It's the best airplane we've built."
But there was a snafu: The plane's two electrical generators quit during the first flight. It posed no threat to Maben and Bruce Barrett, the other test pilot, since all the plane's systems were mechanical at this stage and didn't require power. (Eventually, the A700 will feature a full-color digital display in the cockpit.) "The effect is that the engines are not generating electrical power to recharge your batteries," explains Olcott. It's a similar problem to having a broken alternator in your car.
It took most of the next morning to figure out the glitch and devise a temporary fix. The plane was ready to fly again Monday afternoon, but at that point a hailstorm loomed near the airport. The FAA had told the company that the A700 needed a total of 15 hours airborne before it could go "cross-country" to Oshkosh. After the weather had cleared, the test pilots took the plane up four times on Tuesday--the air show's opening day--and four times on Wednesday. Maben and Barrett took off for Oshkosh on Thursday morning.
Joe Wilding left Colorado for the Oshkosh air show before the first flight on Sunday, so he had yet to see the A700 in the air. AirVenture, organized by the Experimental Aircraft Association, attracts more than 750,000 attendees each summer. Rick Adam describes it as the Comdex of aviation, referring to the big high-tech show held each November in Las Vegas. But it also feels like a flier's version of Woodstock, with pilots in tents beneath the wings of their aircraft. "There are four major air shows in the U.S.," Adam says. "But the biggest by a lot is Oshkosh. If you have a new product, you want to introduce it there."
Wilding learned that the A700 would come in on Runway 27, one of Oshkosh's secondary runways. He and the crew from Adam craned their heads toward that airstrip, and squinted for a sign of the plane coming in from Iowa. "We were all hoping that the plane would be allowed to do a flyby of the air show," Wilding says. "We wanted it to do a low pass, so all of Oshkosh could see it." But the request had been denied; the airspace was too busy with arrivals and departures.
Finally, Wilding spotted the A700. "You could barely see it," he says. "But I could recognize it was our plane from the shape of the tail." As the A700 descended toward the runway, Wilding and the others listened intently on their scanner to the conversation between the control tower and Maben in the cockpit. When the jet was only about 660 feet above the ground, the controller told Maben that there was another airplane on the runway. Maben was instructed to abort the landing. He had to pull up, and then fly a big rectangle pattern at low altitude over the entire air show to line up the plane for a second landing attempt. By happenstance, the A700 had been granted a star turn above Oshkosh.
When its wheels met the runway, the welcoming party broke into cheers and applause.
Marion Blakey, the FAA's top administrator, happened to be visiting the show that Thursday, and she was ferried over in a golf cart to congratulate the Adam Aircraft team. The plane was towed over to Adam Aircraft's vendor booth, where it sat for the rest of the AirVenture show. "I couldn't believe how many people came to the booth and said, 'That's a nice mock-up you have,' " Wilding says. "They wouldn't believe we flew it there from Colorado." Eclipse's personal jet, which underwent its first test flight almost a year before the A700, didn't make it to the show because of a malfunction.
The A700's presence "so surprised Oshkosh crowds," according to the aviation Web site AVweb.com, "that Adam put a sign on the nose asserting that, yes, the airplane really did fly to the show from Denver."
When the A700 returned from Wisconsin, the work pace slowed a bit, but not much. The hydraulic system was installed to raise and lower the landing gear. The cabin interior began to take shape. The engineers, including Wilding, went for their first rides in the plane they'd built--strictly to measure temperature and vibration on the airframe, of course.
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