Designers and visionaries like Van deal with massive amounts of counter intention. Frankly, it gets tiresome. This, IMO, fuels his spirited response.

I believe than Van’s RV-1 as a proof of principle prototype was a fantastice achievement, and aggree with his the position that “dreadful” is not an appropriate adjective to apply. It was all he needed to make the next set of decisions that turned into the finest product line of recreational aircraft in existance. It was simple, to the point, economical, and elegantly provided the confirmation that Van was looking for to move on to the next steps…

Imagine the engineering expense in both hours and prototype fabrication would be spent by Cessna, Beechraft or Piper to develop the RV product line.

The RV-1 was truly the snowball that started the avalanche of the most enjoyable product line of aircraft that exists today.

Sincerely,
Roy A. Haggard,
(Also with a product design and development background)

My first thought was that, though he may be a nice guy, the writer was much less that knowledgeable about the plane and that it was an ” National Inquirer” level intro. The reason I clicked on the story was ONLY to find out what other absurdities might be printed. The rest of the article proved to be fine. The negative thought still lingers.

I was at RV Central while the RV1 was being restored and later flown, though I helped very little. Paul Dye had the big “RV grin” after the initial flight. “dreadful” was a less than stellar choice.

This is to offer another opinion … not to start an opinion WAR !

No doubt the title was a touch pejorative – but that’s a common device that journos often use to generate interest in a story. It’s the information age you know – you need to “cut through” … it hardly marks the plumbing of new depths in aviation journalism, as you suggest.

Case in point: when I read the title, it made me smile – just a tad – and it engaged me just enough to make me click the link in order to read the article. Think of the possibilities – I could have just missed it, or simply ignored it – not bothering to read about you, your RV-1 and the legacy of your later designs at all. Yeah, great work.

I think any fair-minded reader would come away from this article with the impression that the author was pretty balanced and was actually trying to be quite complimentary towards your legacy of remarkable and wonderful airplane designs – starting from the RV-1 onwards. Obviously, as the author stated, they have improved as the models have progressed; even your own response alludes to this fact. Nobody doubts your skills as a designer, or the handling qualities of the RV-1 as an airplane, to which you have devoted much effort in your rebuttal of non-criticism. Clearly the author was concerned about the performance of your pitiful first attempt at a 1-seater when he mentioned it had no problem running down the adjacent Bonza moving at full-steam! Oh hang on ..

If this is how you respond to a good review, I’d hate to see how you deal with a bad one. I guess it’s just good fortune that you’re such a talented airplane designer and therefore don’t receive too many of them. The truly “simply dreadful” thing is that you seem to have missed the bigger picture – that people care about you and your airplanes enough to write about them at length. I’m a little disappointed to be honest.

If you were intentionally trying to pull my chain, you succeeded. To call the RV-1 a “Simply Dreadful” airplane just shows that aviation journalism has sunk to a new low. In its day it had a top speed of 170 mph and a climb rate of over 1700 fpm, and operated comfortably from a 650 ft. long grass runway. It was capable of all normal aerobatic maneuvers up through vertical eights. If that’s “Simply Dreadful”, then I guess that we all need to go back to school. “Good looks” is a subjective term, but in all of the years, I have never had anyone insinuate that it was ugly until now.

The seat now in the RV-1 is a poor substitute for the comfortable bucket seat I had made and installed to accomodate my 6′ 1″ frame in reasonable comfort. A lot of other things were changed on the RV-1 since I sold it in 1968, and none of them improved it in my opinion. It is now about 100 lbs heavier than it was then, but that in itself doesn’t affect much other than the rate of climb and landing speed. The ground handling now is much more sensitive than originally. The wheels probably need aligning, the tire pressure may be too high, and the new tail wheel has springs that are probably too tight. All of these are details which didn’t originally exist and can probably be fixed. To assume that they are inherent problems sufficient to justify condeming the airplane is silly.

The volunteers in Texas did a good job of making the RV-1 airworthy again. They did not have time to bring everything back to its original form and performance.

If the RV-1 had been as “Dreadful” as you have labled it, I never would not have used it as a basis for the RV-3 and all that followed. In fact, the RV-1 in its day was a very good airplane, and is still a good airplane. Its performance, as mentioned above, was the motivation for the “Total Performance” lable we have used for every RV design that followed it.

Simply Dreadful. Indeed!