Former Airline Pilot Now Building His Own Plane

After working on or piloting other people’s planes for most of his life, Dixon’s Rick Stockton III is finally getting a plane of his own, and he’s building it in his garage.

Over on Fountain Way, Stockton is putting the finishing touches on a small Europa XS two-seater plane he expects to complete this spring.

“It’ll only weigh around 900 pounds,” says the 67-year-old Stockton. “It’s 20 feet long and the wingspan is 27 feet. The plane’s parts were made in England, and the new engine is Australian.” 

While being interviewed recently he was working on smoothing out the surfaces of the plane's tail in his back yard. The airplane is built mostly from fiberglass. It appears the remainder of his work involves completing the wings, and installing the instrument panel and flying controls. And then, putting on the canopy and a shiny coat of white paint will complete the project.

So far he’s invested over 2,000 hours of work on the plane, along with around $40,000, mostly for the needed electronics. Luckily, he didn’t have to pay for the basic plane itself – it was given to him by a friend in 2007. It had already been partly built.

He’d completed another plane earlier from blueprints. It featured a VW Bug’s used engine, but the plane turned out to be too heavy and small, and was only a single-seater, which his wife Kyoung didn’t like because she wanted to fly with him. “She also insisted I use a new engine,” admitted Stockton.

Rick Stockton comes from a flying family. After serving in the Navy in World War II his father joined the Air Force and flew with large B-29s during the Korean War. Later, as a military family they moved frequently around the U.S., with son Rick finally graduating from high school in Texas. He immediately enlisted in the Army where he became a helicopter mechanic, serving in Korea for eight years and meeting his wife-to-be. Later he returned to that county as a civilian worker. Upon return to the U.S. again he worked as a flight teacher at the Hayward airport and started an aviation business flying charter planes.

Then for 10 years he worked as an Oakland police officer, trying hard to be assigned to the department’s helicopter crew, but a regular assignment there evaded him. So he left in 1982 to become a regular ‘copter pilot for the East Bay Regional Park organization. He finally made the big time by being accepted into Eastern Airline’s flight training school, and then flying Boeing 727 passenger jets as a co-pilot for five years.

Unfortunately, the airline went bankrupt in 1988, so he traded the big jets and responsibility for some exotic work locales. He helicoptered out of American Samoa in the south Pacific, accompanying fishing boats and scouting for schools of tuna. In 1993 he moved north for a different kind of scenery, flying ‘copters in Alaska to help maintain microwave relay sites and provide parts and support for the salmon industry.

He traded a joystick for a desk in 1996 when he began working for the Federal Aviation Administration in North Carolina doing mostly helicopter pilot testing and plane inspections. “It involved a lot of paperwork,” he said. He was able to transfer to Long Beach to be nearer his wife and then transferred again to the Bay Area in 2001, and settled in Dixon. He retired last December, but is still open to piloting part-time.

Now, as he puts the final pieces of his plane together, he’s looking forward to having the tables turned: Exactly what he used to do as a Federal Aviation Administration employee will be done on his completed plane by an FAA inspector. 

“I’ll be flying it out of the Yolo County Airport,” says Stockton. However, because the plane’s wings can be easily removed by pulling a few pins, he can hanger the plane in his garage and transport it on a trailer to the airport when he wants to fly.

One of Stockton’s friends is also building a plane in Dixon; another, in Livermore.

Perhaps the first long flight Rick Stockton will take will be to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s fly-in airshow in Oshkosh, WI in July. That’s the ultimate show-and-tell venue for plane builders like him.

As we were concluding our interview in Stockton’s garage, he suddenly dashed outside and looked up toward the sky. It was then that I heard the faint engine sound of a private plane passing overhead. Once you get flying in your blood, you’re hooked for life.