Source: 2021 Q1 Beartracks
There have been two first flights for customer-built Bearhawk 4-Place kit-built airplanes. Brent Huddleston completed his kit in under a year, with a 300hp Lycoming IO-540. He’s replacing a Continental-powered Cessna 182 and is very happy with the performance and the room. The striking yellow paint looks great!

The other first flight was Tim Newsome’s airplane in California. He reports, “Last week on my second test flight, during climb out, I heard a loud boom. I thought perhaps I had blown out a window and checked, but all windows were good. A friend on the ground radioed and said he thought I was back firing so I thought I blew something in the engine. The engine instruments were all good, but I made an emergency landing and taxied to my hangar. When I exited the plane, I saw what the issue was, and it wasn’t the engine. The fabric on the fuselage above my head had filled like a balloon and loudly burst ripping the fabric. I couldn’t see any of this because I have a headliner that stayed intact. The backfiring was actually the fabric snapping in the wind like a flag in a windstorm.” Kudos to Tim for staying cool and flying the airplane, executing a safe landing despite a very pressing distraction.