I haven't really been up to much of late other than work and flying school. Ground school is held two nights a week (but is nearly over) and I've been scheduling flying lessons four times a week (still pre-solo, so I have a while left to go). For the math-impaired, that adds up to six days a week where I spend a considerable amount of time at the airport. Tack in work and there isn't time for much else right now.

Of course, in those few hours I do have, I'm busy planning my future homebuilt. The planning process consists of a few basic things. Before anything else, I first need to study the plans and understand how the construction process works. Without that understanding, I can't move on to later stages, such as design alterations and workspace considerations.

By design alterations, I'm not referring to changes to the airframe. I'm content to remain with a normal level of crazy, so let's not elevate this to bat-shit insane.

I am not referring to instrumentation and avionics, either. These are so user-specific as to not even be seriously considered part of the plans (and can be easily deferred to the end after another year or two of technological improvement has passed).

Some design alterations have become fairly standard, like replacing the Cozy's hand-cracked retractable nose gear and manual landing brake with electrically actuated systems. So while they need to be considered, I'm not worried about those yet (since there are off-the-shelf drop-in systems).

Right now, I'm thinking about precipitation static (or p-static). Basically, this can be thought of as lightning in reverse: charge builds up on the airplane as it passes through precipitation and when it builds up far enough, it starts discharging and can generate enough RF static to disable radio operation (if not zap the electronics or occupants directly).

For metal aircraft, this issue is easily resolved with the conductive skin and some lightning-rod like attachments; however, for composite aircraft, the situation is more complicated. Fiberglass is a fairly good insulator, so commercial aircraft (such as those by Cirrus) include a fine metal mesh in the top layer. The Rutan-derived composites (such as the Cozy) do no such thing by default. In fact, they take often advantage of the lack of skin conductivity and embed the antennae so they don't stick out into the airstream.

The vast majority of builders make no attempt to resolve this known risk and there do not appear to be a large number of reports of problems. I can speculate on a couple of possibilities for this: The majority of aircraft could be staying with the day VFR mission originally envisioned. The problem could be more common but simply not recognized or reported. The carbon black primer could be sufficiently conductive to alleviate the p-static issue. Alternatively, this problem could simply be an imagined one.

Of course, as an electrical engineer, I'm convinced I could spend some time to study this problem. For an embedded whip antenna, the ground plane is a necessary feature and can easily be integrated into the protective mesh. For half-wave antennae, the mesh shouldn't interfere if it is co-planar with the image charge plane. When it is necessary to protect the area over the antenna, a very coarse mesh could provide a level of protection while minimizing RF shielding.

Now, while I figure out where I'm going to build the thing, I can do some scale components to test the RF effectiveness of various p-static mitigation techniques: Lay up some small wings and hook it up to one of the Network Analyzers at work: do I still have a functional antenna?