Paul Kendrick

This is one of the many projects that has such great history and a builder with insane determination. Read Paul's story and send us you own Titan™ story to share with others here.

I started building my RV-7 when I was 19. I was a full time aeronautical engineering student at Cal Poly and was working a full time job at a small engineering firm building UAVs. Over the course of the build, I bought into a lot of hype about automotive conversion engines, and bought a Subaru package. From start to first flight took about 7 years and around 2000 hours of build time. During that period, I continued to work full time for the drone company, graduated from Cal Poly (with a business degree... didn’t quite finished the engineering), and courted and married a young woman willing to put up with my airplane project.

While at Cal Poly, I managed to convince the Chair of the Aero department that the university should build an RV, as well. I taught a lab class for a couple years and made pretty good progress through the kit. The project stalled for awhile, but was ultimately completed and is now used to teach flight test.

I flew my RV with the Subaru for about 360 hours. By RV standards, the plane was heavy and slow, but it was a still an RV, so not all bad. I enjoyed a lot of local flying with family and friends, and in 2012 flew back to Oshkosh.

In late 2012, I decided that I’d had enough of the Subaru, and was ready to make the change to a Lycoming. I bought a used engine with the intent of overhauling it, but it turned out to be quite the basket case. I sold off the good parts, and bought an “overhauled” engine instead. As it turned out, the overhaul was rather poorly done. The shop warrantied their work, but after 6 months waiting for the rework to be complete, I finally realized I would be best served by buying a new engine. After collecting quotes from several vendors, I concluded that Titan™ offered the best value proposition, and the IOX-370 was clearly going to give me phenomenal performance.

So, with a proper engine and prop (Hartzell blended airfoil), the only logical thing left to do was put some paint on the plane, call it done, and get back to flying!