In some ways, Peter Sripol, EAA 1283911, is just like any other homebuilder. Peter consults plenty of his aviation friends on his projects, and he freely admits that aspects of other aircraft designs influence parts of his scratchbuilt airplanes. He certainly isn’t the only homebuilder to find inspiration for a project at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. And, like almost all homebuilders, Peter builds because he loves to fly.
There are a few differences between the average builder and Peter, though. For one, most people’s builds aren’t followed by millions of people on YouTube, many of whom may not know a thing about aviation. Peter’s are. Also, while most homebuilt projects take years, Peter’s typically end up taking months, if not weeks. Finally, most EAAers aren’t using foam insulation from a hardware store for their wing surfaces, but Peter sure did for his first project.
A Genuine Love of Aviation
Before hundreds of thousands of people began subscribing to his videos online, Peter was making YouTube videos of his various tinkering projects with RC creations. Even farther back, he caught the aviation bug and used whatever was around him to get a fix.
“Way back before I could get anything RC to work, I used to cut gliders out of Styrofoam plates and make all sorts of designs,” Peter said. “I’d make anything out of Styrofoam plates. I did that a lot.”
It didn’t take too long for Peter to figure out some of the finer points of RC flying, and by the time high school rolled around, he was heavily involved in what could basically be described as tinkering. It was a mutual love of RC aircraft that introduced Peter to Sam Foskuhl, his good friend and media manager.
“We were in about 10th grade, and the first day the teacher asked, ‘What do you guys do?’” Sam said. “I was like, ‘I like RC airplanes.’ Peter asked if I liked RC airplanes, and he said he did, too. We were friends ever since.”
The two went to different colleges. Peter originally intended to become a commercial pilot and then a mechanical engineer, but he didn’t like either of those career options. Then Flite Test, an online community focused on aviation ranging from RC to drones to full-scale airplanes, came calling.
“Flite Test said, ‘Hey, we need someone to come fill this creative void. Come on down,’” Peter said. “So I went down there for two and a half years and worked for them.”
Anyone familiar with Peter’s work with Flite Test is surely unsurprised by both the type of content he’s making on his own and the success of his videos. One example of his work there entailed Peter using an RC boat with a harpoon gun he attached to it to rescue a downed RC airplane in the middle of a lake.
Peter’s departure from Flite Test wasn’t any sort of a Beatles-esque breakup situation — he detailed in a Facebook post at the time that he chose to step down from his role there to return home and help his parents at their restaurant. That is exactly what he did for a few years while he got his own YouTube channel started. Most of his early videos feature his parents’ basement in Ohio, which served as his workshop until he recently got his own space.
As he made more and more videos showing off his inventive spirit, Peter began attracting his own following of viewers just waiting to see what he would do next. Ever an aviation lover, Peter attended EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2017 for just a few days to visit some friends, and he left feeling inspired.
Without the time or the money to build a more conventional airplane, Peter decided to take it in his own hands to get into the air and satisfy his love for flight.
“It was like, no one’s going to hand me an airplane, so I might as well just go build my own airplane,” he said. “So I went home and started building.”
Lots of different ideas went through Peter’s head as he planned out his first airplane. He decided to make a low-and-slow flier, both for ease of construction and safety purposes.
“I’d never built an airplane before,” Peter said. “So, the slower you go, typically the easier it is to build the airplane. The slowest airplanes I’ve seen are typically biplanes because you get more drag and you got more lift. So I went and built a biplane.”
Peter’s biplane is powered by electric RC motors that drive model airplane propellers, and the wing surfaces are made up of foam board insulation. Despite its strikingly different appearance, Peter readily admits to borrowing aspects of proven designs for the concept. Under the now-iconic foam board, triangulated wood pieces in Pietenpol style provide the structure of the biplane.
“It’s got wings like I’ve seen on other aircraft,” Peter said. “Back then I took some inspiration from a Pietenpol with some of the triangulations inside of the fiberglass structure. You can’t really see it too well because of the fuselage, but you can see the triangulation inside there as well. The spar is the same thickness as a Pietenpol. It’s a 3/4-inch spar, solid poplar.”
Peter also used the same wing spar dimensions as the Pietenpol, even though his biplane doesn’t weigh anywhere near the 600 pounds the Pietenpol does. Other sources of inspiration included the Mini-Max and Burt Rutan’s designs. As much fun as he has with his “foam board” airplane, Peter admits the outlandishness of the idea is overstated.
“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s kind of a false thing. Yeah, there’s foam on it, but underneath there’s a triangulated wood structure like the Pietenpol and all that. It’s fiberglassed over. I’ve seen Burt Rutan’s designs like the Long-EZ — that’s foam, too. It’s just fiberglassed so you don’t see the foam.”
Peter was realistic with his design goals for this first airplane — he never intended it to fly for a long time, or over long distances, or to have a long life. He just wanted to fly.
“People don’t understand — it’s really easy to make something to get up in the air and fly,” Peter said. “Making something to get up and fly after the 100th hour is a little more difficult. The 1,000th hour is harder, and so on, and so on. Also the faster they go, the worse it gets.”
In addition to getting him back into the air, Peter also viewed his first design as a gateway to doing more designing and building in the future. In essence, it was one big teachable moment.
“You learn a lot when you build this,” Peter said. “I’ll learn what to do with certain things, what works here and there, and what doesn’t work. That’s why we get the first one out of the way. That’s why this plane is only meant to fly for so long and then this gets retired to a party decoration or ceiling decoration or something. It’s not meant to be flown forever like other people when they build airplanes.”
With a predetermined mission and a trial and error attitude, Peter ended up with an airplane that captivated thousands of people online and in person at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2018. The end result is fascinating, but there were some literal bumps on the way there.
“The landing gear changed a lot because I wasn’t really sure how to build landing gear,” Peter said. “I’ll admit that [in] my model airplane days, I was never really the best at building landing gear. But I knew landing gear was not flight critical. … Because the plane’s so slow, it’ll just kind of mess the airplane up. Big deal. I can walk away from that.”
Differing Aviation Experiences
Before flying his foam board biplane, the bulk of Peter’s flight experience came in a Cessna 172, an experience Peter likened to “flying a toaster around.” His biplane, though, was more reminiscent of “flying a wet paper bag.”
“The Cessna flies fine,” Peter said. “It’s very like, you do this, you do this, you’ll be back on the ground no problem. … But this [foam board biplane], I was just flying by the seat of my pants.”
Peter is typically a reserved, factual person with what could be described as a dry sense of humor, but it’s easy to see how exciting he finds flying. When he first landed the biplane after some of the most extensive flying he’d done in it, he couldn’t wipe the grin from his face.
“I really wish you guys could experience this,” Peter said, with euphoria engrained in the words. “This is insane. It flies, and it flies very well.”
Proclaiming you’re going to build an airplane is one thing. Actually designing and flying it is another. Plenty of people, including Sam, were skeptical that Peter would actually get it done.
“When he first saw the ultralights fly and he said, ‘I’m going to build my own ultralight,’ I was like everyone else, like no he’s not,” Sam said. “Then he started making it, and everyone followed along with the series, and it was like, he’s kind of making a plane. And then it flew.”
As much fun as he may have had with his first airplane, Peter is always on to the next thing. He doesn’t think he’ll fly that one again. In the several months since its completion, he built and flew a second ultralight, one that sustained damage from a landing gear failure after a ground loop on takeoff. Peter is already planning a third build, inspired by the minuscule light airframes that come from an era he describes as “way back in the ’70s and ’80s.”
Eventually, he would like to build something bigger. Peter has talked about building a more traditional airplane at some point, although it won’t be his next project or the next few after that. He’s got some more flamethrowers and RC fun to have before the lengthy process of designing and building an experimental amateur-built aircraft.
Perception Versus Reality
Peter is an easy-going guy, and he likes to have fun in all of his videos, no matter what the subject matter is. This may make it seem as though he’s carefree to a fault, which is not accurate. He’s a trained pilot and engineer who has spent thousands of hours learning the subjects necessary to do all of this amazing work.
Projects evolve on the fly, but design goals, and the design itself, take plenty of further hours for each and every project. CAD images act as sort-of plans, although Peter doesn’t distribute any for liability reasons, due to the large percentage of his viewers who aren’t similarly equipped for airplane construction.
Most builders, even with Peter’s background, probably cannot do what he does. He learns from pilots around him, and largely from the internet.
“[I’m] online self-taught,” Peter said. “I basically just watched and analyzed what people would do, as far as when certain things would fail or crash, and worked those things out of my design.”
In addition to seeking out ideas and feedback, Peter is also receptive to unsolicited advice and opinion. He gets a ton of it on his YouTube videos in the comments section, plenty of which is plainly uninformed and not useful or productive. Once in a while, though, something useful does come up.
“I don’t completely brush comments off,” Peter said. “If they’re saying something reasonable that actually has some merit, I will look into it. Half the time some of these people are right. They’re usually small things that would catch me after the 1,000th hour on the airframe.”
Attracting an Audience
Comments regarding safety are only one aspect of being a YouTube-famous airplane builder. Peter said he started his channel because of other YouTubers he saw who seemed to be having a lot of fun with it. Although, there’s more work and stress involved than most viewers know.
“I don’t really want a traditional boring job,” Peter said. “Even though it would be really nice some days, this is still maybe a little bit better. Even though it’s a lot more stress, a lot more late nights where you don’t get to sleep, and a lot of looking over your shoulder every five minutes for that next paycheck.”
As for the success of his and other innovators’ channels, Peter believes that comes down to consumers missing shows like Monster Garage and Junkyard Wars in the era of vapid reality television owning the airwaves.
“Those were so fun back in the day, and there’s nothing like that on TV anymore,” he said. “It’s all gone to this reality TV show garbage drama stuff. [I] can’t watch it, and there’s nothing really to watch if you just want to watch some people build some fun stuff. I looked at what was missing on YouTube, what was in my skill set range, and I just went about that. So far it’s been pretty good because I kind of filled a void that wasn’t really there, and I get to do what I like to do.”
It really shouldn’t be that surprising that an inventive airplane builder has found himself a large audience — after all, EAA founder Paul Poberezny wrote all the way back in 1973 that builders tend to draw a crowd.
“The builder is a special kind of person, the kind of person who can attract an audience or fellow members,” Paul wrote in Sport Aviation. He wasn’t referring to YouTube, of course, but the point certainly stands some four and a half decades later.
People are naturally drawn to great, innovative things — whether they’re happening in a basement in Hales Corners or in one in Ohio that they can access through YouTube videos. Such innovators are inspiring, and they drive further innovation through the example they set. Aviation provides the spark that has driven great aviators for more than a century now.
“Everyone thinks about that as a kid,” Peter said. “You know, what if I take these cardboard wings and jump off my roof, will I fly? Well, maybe change that from cardboard to foam wings and jump off your roof with an airplane fuselage and it might work.”
This feature originally ran in the January 2019 issue of EAA Sport Aviation magazine. – Ed.