With its huge, preselected aviation audience, EAA AirVenture is the ultimate dog-and-pony stage on which many companies debut new hardware and software. Significant this year are new airplanes that offer a good balance between price and performance, technology that improves the educational process, and flight schools that, one hopes, make training more efficient, economical, and palatable to today’s time-stressed prospective pilots. If properly adopted and employed, individually and as a whole, they have the potential to create a brighter future for aviation.
Cognizant of the demands on your time, I’ll share this AirVenture bounty by topic in separate posts. 
Let’s start with the surprise debut of the RV-14. The IO-390-powered side-by-sider is an aerobatic two-seat RV-10. Preceded by no warning and few rumors, it led a line of every Van’s RV model down to the restored RV-1, flown by Dick VanGrunsven himself, which was presented to the EAA AirVenture Museum.
The RV-14 embodies 40 years of Van’s Aircraft kit building experience, so its match-holed aluminum pieces will become an airplane quicker and with less head scratching. With an 810-pound useful load, on 210-hp it’ll cruise at 195 mph. More important to the future of aviation, two large people fit in it comfortably. That includes me, at 6-foot-5, 260 pounds, with a 38-inch inseam and size 15 feet. Estimated build cost is around $90K, depending how much glass one puts in the panel. Compare that to a new store-bought airplane of similar performance, and DIY really pays off. A taildragger version is in the works.
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