First Bearhawk Five Kit Delivery

Source: 2020 Q4 Beartracks, Colby Osborn

I know 2020 has been dismal for many, but I’m fortunate to report that I’ll be sailing out of 2020 on cloud nine. Recently my wife and I were the first recipients of a Bearhawk Model 5 kit. We had been strongly considering the 4-place for quite some time, but when the news came out about the larger Model 5 we quickly signed up for a kit. As a young couple we wanted to build something that we could grow into and would serve us well for the rest of our flying days.
Saturday December 12th was a snowy but pleasant day in Nebraska. Mike Nellis came rolling into town with our kit, a Companion kit, and a single wing; both destined for snowier places. After a quick look at the kit’s new home Mike began unpacking. It was obvious that Mike has done this for years as he quickly and efficiently unpacked everything. First he cut off the thick white shrink wrap put on to shed water, wind, highway debris, etc., on the kit’s 800+ mile trip from Texas. Pretty much everything that comes with the kit other than the fuselage and wings was packed neatly inside the fuselage with an impressive amount of bubble wrap, corrugated cardboard, packing tape, and polystyrene. Mike unloaded and handed all of the parts from within the fuselage to us as we shuttled them from the trailer parked on the narrow street outside our house down our even narrower driveway to the shop. After the fuselage was emptied we carried it into the shop and set it on a couple of furniture dollies.

Next up was the wings. The best way to store the wings while we work on the rest of the kit was something I pondered for quite a while. In my opinion keeping them in the substantial metal crates that they come securely packed in is the best option. Floor space in our shop is at a premium so I didn’t want to give up the required space. The next best option was to hang them from the spar fitting and aileron bracket with the leading edge hanging down. The problem with this solution in my application is our celling is only 10 feet tall so I would either have to give up headspace or wall space. Both were too painful to bear, so I went with option number three and hung them flat against the ceiling. The downside to this approach is it requires either an elaborate block and tackle system or several people to safely hoist them up and hold them while they’re secured in place. Fortunately our kit came on a Saturday so finding friends and family to help wasn’t an issue. The extra hands were also nice to have while unloading the wing crates from the trailer onto furniture dollies Mike brought and then pushing them down our driveway.

Truth be told, I’m still removing bubble wrap and packing tape, but I can confirm our kit experienced zero damage on it journey from Atlixco Mexico up to Nebraska. I’m excited to learn from the knowledgeable and generous Bearhawk community as we assemble our kit.
Check out Colby’s video here:
https://youtu.be/IJfDQyIEcho
Colby also took these photos, which show the factory seat arrangement for the Bearhawk Five. The front attach points for the third seat are the same as the rear attach points for the middle seat. The middle seat sits forward vs. the prototype.

Bearhawk Five Air to Air Photo Session

Source: 2020 Q4 Beartracks, Jared Yates
In early December I made a trip over to Mark Goldberg’s ranch to visit his Bearhawk Five. One of the big magazines had hired a professional photographer to get some air-to-air photos of it, and I’m covered on Mark’s insurance for such occasions. The photographer was based out of the Dallas area, and Mark is just outside of Austin. The two airports are 189nm apart straight line, but a little further by air, to avoid the DFW Class B. An air-to-air photo shoot requires coordination and planning, and I definitely didn’t want to be late. So I planned to arrive at Mark’s the night before, with plenty of time to get settled. Naturally, the best time of day for a photo session is either the morning or evening, and the photographer preferred the evening with a 3:00pm meeting. That made for a nice leisurely morning, with around an hour and a half of total flight time to get to the meeting point.

The airplane started the day with around half tanks of fuel, but not really enough to get to the destination comfortably, and certainly not enough for the session, so I planned a cheap fuel stop part-way at Temple, Texas. I’d fallen prey to the rookie mistake of not bringing an iPad charging cable, so while at TPL I borrowed a car for a quick trip to town. Walmart had plenty of cables, and the What-a-Burger in the parking lot had a fantastic hamburger with green chilies. Winds were light by Texas standards, but they were headwinds, so I stayed around 1500-2000 feet AGL to enjoy the scenery and stay out of the stronger winds above. In this mode, I set 22 inches MAP, 2400 RPM, and 12 gallons per hour. This yielded 140mph IAS, and helped spread out the fuel stops a little, compared to higher power settings.

The photographer had arranged to use a small privately-owned airport with two grass runways. He prepared his Baron for the photo ship, but not being sure about speed, also had a Cub on standby. A few years ago I did a session with our Bearhawk 4-Place and a Cub, and it was much slower than ideal, so I’m glad he felt good enough about our top speed to use the Baron. The owners of the airport are a husband and wife who both fly all the time. They are both career pilots, aerobatic competitors, volunteer warbird pilots, etc. The husband would be flying the Baron, with the photographer strapped in the back with the door removed. During the briefing, the photographer asked how much formation flying experience I had, which is “some, but not that much.”
I have no doubts that I could have safely completed the flight, but it turns out that the wife of the host couple was much more experienced, and was willing to ride along and handle the formation work. This sounded like a great deal to me– she’d get to do all of the hard work, and I could look around for towers, birds, and air traffic. Since she knows her husband very well, and the photographer pretty well, she’d have fast and intuitive communication when speed and intuition would be most handy to have.
Before we got to that point, we realized the plane was a little dusty. They were kind enough to let me borrow their hose to rinse off most of the dust. I moved everything out of the cabin and made the seatbelts look orderly, and the photographer took pictures of the interior. Then we moved the plane out into the sun for some still pictures of the exterior. He wanted to get a series of pictures of the plane from the ground, so we flew three hops around the pattern, demonstrating one max performance takeoff, a high-energy (wheel) landing, a low-speed “plop” landing, and a forward slip.

Then we spent a few minutes talking about the formation flight, including what we were hoping to accomplish, how we would communicate, and what the basic plan of the flight would be. The session itself went well. It wasn’t high stress, but it was a busy time without much idle chatting. The target speed was 110-120 knots, so of course we had no trouble keeping up. The pilot was quite complimentary of the Five’s handling characteristics, especially how responsive the controls were. This is coming from a highly-experienced Pitts owner. The whole team was very professional and gracious, and while I would have loved to hang around and visit for another few days, I had some miles to cover. Since I don’t fly single-engine piston planes at night, and the Five doesn’t have any lights, there wouldn’t be enough time to make it all the way back to Mark’s before dark. I planned a stop at Decatur Texas, but as I approached and measured the tailwind, it looked like I could press on for another 30nm to Lake Weatherford and still land before sunset. This plan worked, without many minutes to spare. I tied down the airplane and lucked into a ride to the hotel, for a big BBQ supper and sleep.
The next morning my plan was to begin the takeoff right at sunrise, which meant getting to the airplane in the dark for fueling and preflight. I missed my goal by around three minutes, but was happy to make a safe landing back at Mark’s an hour later. For the whole trip, the plane performed perfectly.
I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the airplane with the recent issue of Kitplanes magazine, which included a cover photo and Paul Dye’s favorable review article.

First Flight of the new 3000-pound Bearhawk Five

Source: 2020 Q2 Beartracks, Jared Yates
There is another new member of the Bearhawk family! This one is the fifth, and also the largest. This new and highly capable variant has been in the works for several years. It uses the same wings as the Bearhawk 4-Place Model B, but the fuselage, landing gear, and tail pieces are all new designs.
This particular prototype has wings that were built in the Mexico factory by Bearhawk Aircraft, back in the earliest days of the Model B tool-up. The fuselage was originally lofted by Bob’s local friend Jerry Mullins, though Jerry had lost some momentum as the years went by. Skipping ahead to early 2018, serial builder Collin Campbell had finished building his Bearhawk LSA and the vacancy in his shop had him itching for the next project. The Five made its way out to Bolivar, Missouri and just a little more than two years later, here it is.
Collin is perhaps the most experienced Bearhawk builder excluding the factory and Bob Barrows, and his experience shows in the fit and finish of this new prototype. This project required a different mindset and strategy. Collin had a set of plans, but they weren’t yet as tidy and customer-ready as we expect from finished plans. He made frequent contacts with Bob to clarify and adjust as necessary.
When it was finished, Bearhawk Patrol builder and owner Rollie VanDorn from Zanesville, Ohio, came for a visit. Rollie conducted the first flight and the first several hours of flight testing, validating the handling characteristics and initial CG envelope tests. Weather and “day job” constraints conspired to keep Rollie from testing for a little while, so Mark asked if I might be able to go fly a few hours as directed by Bob.
Under normal circumstances, Bob Barrows would be flying these first few hours. In that stage, he wants to be sure that he likes the way the airplane flies. But since he is still recovering from his ankle injuries, he wasn’t up for travelling this time. Instead, Rollie and I were his remote eyes and ears, making multiple phone calls per day to report data and establish the next steps.
When I got there, Bob wanted to validate his positioning of the CG limits, so that he could finalize the first version of the plans. Word had gotten out about the new plane, and Mark had already taken the first two kit orders. Factory tooling was held up waiting for plans, and plans were held up waiting on some test flights.
The airplane slept in the hangar at Collin’s house, where he has a short grass runway. Collin and his wife Sarah let me stay at their house in the guest room, which made life quite luxurious. I arrived via airline flight and rental car late on a Sunday night, just around dark. I hadn’t been to Collin’s since June 2018, when I stopped by to interview Collin and get photos for the Kitplanes article about his three Bearhawks. In the photo to the right from that visit, you can see the tail section of the Five, which we snuck unannounced into the magazine.
That evening, Collin brought me up to speed on where he and Rollie had left off, and we took a look at the airplane. The most enduring impressions were the build quality and the size. Having crawled around Collin’s three other airplanes to take pictures two years ago, I’ve come to appreciate the “Collin Style”. This includes light colors, clean simplicity, and a soft inviting paint texture that comes from the “Polytone-over EP420” finishing process on all of the metal parts. Something about that is just a little less harsh than the mirror-gloss of Aerothane, or the “orange-peel gloss” of Aerothane that I’ve become accustomed to on the airplane at home. As for size, the cabin is a foot longer, and the fuselage is two feet longer overall. The cabin door is quite obviously wider when looking at the side of the fuselage, and there is an extra few inches of cabin width. The wider fuselage makes the wingspan ever so slightly longer, but that’s not something that shows up in a walkaround. On the other hand, the taller vertical stabilizer, and the thicker and longer span of the horizontal stabilizer and elevator do certainly catch my eye. I’m a little extra-aware of the 4-Place tail span, having executed a wee-hours operation to tow the fuselage to an airport before the first flight, without removing the elevators. There’s no hope of getting away with that on the Five. To someone who hasn’t walked around a few Bearhawks, it might pass as a 4-Place, but I think any builder or observant Bearhawk fan would be able to sense the size difference right away.
Collin built and configured this airplane with the expectation that it would eventually become part of Mark Goldberg’s company demo fleet, so it incorporates several of Mark’s equipment preferences. The panel is minimal VFR to keep down the weight and the distractions. The interior is configured with four seats, though of course there is enough room in the cabin for a third row. If building it to be a 6-seater, the second row seat could come forward a little to sacrifice some of its cavernous legroom, which would be nice for the third row occupants. As it is currently configured, this plane is a very spacious 4-seater. Mark also selected the engine, which is a beastly Lycoming IO-580 rated at 315 horsepower. The three-blade Hartzell Trailblazer prop is the same one that I’ve flown on Mark’s Bearhawk 4-Place, and the thrust is fantastic. The parallel-valve O-540 is another less thirsty option that should still produce a nice flying Bearhawk Five, with its mere 240hp.
On the first day of flying, we were able to complete Bob’s tasks for verifying the forward CG limit. This involved incrementally moving the CG forward, with a flight after each change to verify that there was still adequate flare authority in the landing. Even at our forward-most configuration, there was plenty of elevator authority left for the flare, without needing to add power. As we moved the CG forward, the neutral elevator position became increasingly nose-up, until it reached around 4 inches at the counterbalance. The Five, along with newer Four-Place kits have 35 degrees of nose-up elevator travel. The increased travel, increased tail size, and airfoil-shaped profile all helped us reach a more favorable forward limit. Since this the first prototype, there will be some differences in the serial kits. The prototype has a ballast box in the back of the baggage area, and it isn’t yet clear whether a similar box will be required in production kits. Bob designed the heavy-duty steel box so that four separate 38-pound weights can be added or removed. Each weight is a piece of round steel bar, which you would definitely not want to drop on your toe, or anything else. Thankfully there is a sturdy handle on top of each one. Bob is always good at designing lightweight structures, but in the case of a ballast box, the design goal changes since adding weight is the goal. I’m happy to attest that he’s quite capable of designing heavy things also.
On the second day of flying we tested both the maximum gross weight, and the aft CG. This required ballast, so I started by ballasting myself with a hardy breakfast. I needed it, because with an empty weight of 1512 and a target flight test weight of 3000 pounds, there was a serious gap to fill. We used concrete mix bags, sand and gravel bags, and fuel to gradually work our way up to 3000 pounds and the
rear-most CG. While we didn’t get very scientific with the takeoff and landing roll measurements, just watching the runway lights and markings showed a takeoff roll of around 500 feet at the heaviest weight, with a climb rate of 1000 feet per minute and a fuel burn of 30 gallons per hour.
The cruise performance was very good, even at much more favorable engine settings. When I configured the engine for the same 8 GPH fuel burn that I would expect to use on my O-360-powered 4-Place, the Five yielded the same 115 mph cruise speed. This tells me that any performance penalties of the heavier weight are overshadowed by the drag improvements absent from my Model A. We find that most of Bob’s airplanes don’t suffer much of a cruise speed reduction at higher weights. At an economy power setting more fitting for this engine of 12.3 GPH, the IAS was 141 mph, CAS was 131, and TAS was 150 mph. The calculated engine output was 56% power, at 2400 RPM and full throttle, lean of peak. This is how I would have set up the engine if I was going to go somewhere with it. But just for giggles, advancing the mixture level upped the fuel flow to 17 GPH, which the little JPI calculated to be 70% power. This got an extra 13 mph on the true airspeed, but my wallet was trembling even though I wasn’t paying for the fuel. Some sort of pocket solidarity going on there. This particular plane has 50 gallons of fuel, which means there are real range implications to flying like that for long. Collin placarded these tanks at 25 gallons each, leaving a small air gap at the top to limit overboard venting. Totally filling them up to the tippy-top, they might hold a little more than 50, but might not hold it for long if flying even slightly uncoordinated.
There are much more detailed accounts of the test flights at https://bearhawkforums.com in the new channel that we created just for the Bearhawk Five. The biggest takeaway for me is that Bob has created a fantastic new addition to the lineup. I was first attracted to the Bearhawk because it had four seats, and so few homebuilts do. The payload and cabin size of the Five will open up a broader market and make available an airplane with very few peers. It was quite a privilege to get some time in the airplane, and I hope many more of you will get to experience it once it’s out of the Phase 1 period and out and about. There is much more testing and proving to do, taking the airplane out to its natural habitat and really showing what it is capable of.