Notes on Flying on Your Own Wings

I have made so many notes in my personal copy of Flying on Your Own Wings by Chris Heintz. I have at least 100 hours reading this book. When I first moved to California and couldn’t actively build an airplane, I spent all of my time looking into airplane design, and I read this book a lot.

I first attempted to read it in the 8th grade (the 2nd edition was the current edition at the time) because I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer when I was a kid, but I couldn’t make sense of the math then to get through the book. Years later, I tried to get through several other textbooks on aircraft design, but none of them made any sense to me. I knew the math, the structures, the fluids, but I didn’t understand how to relate them to aircraft design.

So I revisited Chris’ book, which ignores the complicated stuff you don’t need to worry about when you’re starting out. Then, the more complicated things finally started making sense. To be clear: this is the book I recommend to anyone interested in getting started with the process of aircraft design. Let me be even clearer: if you know nothing about aircraft design and want to learn about aircraft design, you need this book. Heintz revolutionized aircraft homebuilding, and to this day I strongly feel it is the right way to design: simple, cost-effective, pragmatic.

Last weekend, I spoke with another EAA member who was interested in designing his own plane. He asked my friend with an RV-12 project about the weight of the wing panels. I noted that Chris Heintz’s book had some good estimation formulas for that. In fact, his book has great estimation formulas for… well… just about everything to get going on a new design. About that time, I realized that I had several notes in my copy, and it would probably be a wise idea to write them down if I ever lost it.

That’s why I wrote my notes to Heintz’s book (3rd edition), which you can download here. It’s written in LaTeX to make writing formulas easier, but the source code is here in Overleaf.

If you’ve worked through the book and also made notes that you feel are worthwhile to add, please consider syncing with me. I’m happy to mark other corrections and clarifications as submitted.