FEATURE
HOMEBUILT HORNET – A TOUCH OF DIFFERENCE Mark Smith looks at a unique design that’s that's turning heads
On the runway at Colac airfield.
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magine buying a set of plans for a single seat aircraft and the instructions said to begin, buy two fibreglass Canadian canoes! Builder Colin Jamieson didn’t have a set of plans but he did use two canoes as the basis of his own-design Hornet’s fuselage, one on top of the other. It’s a unique approach but there was method to his madness. While he has no formal background in aircraft design, a trait shared with many great designers, he does understand that flowing lines equal low drag and this is how the canoes came into the picture. “I wanted a compound curve fuselage
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and I wanted something that was aerodynamic. A canoe is designed with fluid dynamics in mind and they are similar to aerodynamics so I figured a canoe slides through the water so a fuselage incorporating canoes would slice through the air.” The Hornet was his second own-design, the first being the Cobram Cobra with fabric-covered wings and a wooden fuselage. After working with such traditional materials and techniques he decided he wanted something a bit different with his next effort. “After I built the Cobra and flew it for a number of years I decided I wanted to
improve on that. I wanted it to be able to be disassembled and assembled by one person and I wanted it to have flaps. I was sick of fabric so I wanted hard surface wings and tail and I wanted something that looked a bit different. I also wanted something that would eat Jabirus but not look like one,” he says, laughing. “All my friends fly Jabs so I like to go faster than they do!” The recently retired farmer, who is also a motor mechanic, has been around aviation for most of his life thanks to his father who has been a glider and power pilot, in Colin’s words ‘forever’. “I’ve always been interested in flying.