Source: 2024 Q3 Beartracks, Jared Yates
This is the newsletter of the Bob Barrows airplanes, but this quarter we’re going to include a very Bearhawk-proximate project because its builder has been a long-time friend and contributor to the community and many folks know him and the project. Kevin calls it an “Ursa Buteo”. “Ursa” is the Latin root for “Bear” and “Buteo” is the name of the genus that includes hawks.
23 years ago, Kevin started work on what would become a stretched, widened, and long-gear version of the Bearhawk. Back then, the Bearhawk Five was not an option, and these days it would be interesting to park the two planes side-by-side to compare measurements. Whenever anyone starts talking about “just making a few changes” to the design of a plane, red flags and alarm bells should go off if those changes include anything like stretching, widening, or lengthening the gear! This is a “probably shouldn’t try this at home” case, but Kevin has the engineering chops to do it right. He designed the new fuselage with the same techniques that Bob would have for a new design, analyzing the strength requirements and capabilities of each tube and cluster in the structure. The landing gear is tall enough that it needs two steps! The wings are not substantially changed from those on an original Bearhawk, though Kevin did create his own composite wingtips. A project of this scope required fabrication of several custom parts. The design became known informally as the “Desert Bearhawk” and a few renderings floated around with an M14 radial engine. In this plane, Kevin used a Continental IO-470 which he assembled himself. He had experience with Continental assembly in a previous job. The prop is a big composite 3-blade Hartzell. The panel is built around the Dynon HDX system and the paint and fabric are Stewarts System. The airframe is full of small features that show a high attention to detail; I hope you are able to see it one day!