New Felts hangar to house airplane-kit construction interest

Felts Field is getting a new hangar for the private construction of kit airplanes.

Norris Brown and Scott Buck, owners of Buck N Brown Hangars LLC, are building the new 6,345-square-foot hangar to build kit planes for their personal use.

Brown, 72, said the pair won a bid to lease the “last piece of ground” at the small airport in July at a cost of about $4,500 a year. Construction of the hangar, which is being built by Spokane Valley-based Ironwood Structures, is estimated at $330,000, according to city permit data.

Brown, a retired business analyst with Kaiser Aluminum and an Air Force veteran, said the hangar gives him space to build a second kit plane, his main occupation since retiring.

“I retired on April 15 four years ago and the next day I was down here starting to build,” Brown said. His first kit plane was a Van’s Aircraft RV-14, a small two-seater with a 27-foot wingspan that tops out at 200 mph. It took him three years and 3,000 hours to build and, since April, he’s flown 165 hours in the plane.

“The only problem is getting in and out, you have to be a little bit of an acrobat,” he said of the aircraft.

His next project, and the reason for needing a larger hangar, is an RV-10, which has four seats and is easier to board. As Brown and his wife get older, he said, it would be nice to avoid the acrobatics.

Brown has had his pilot’s license since 1973 and has flown 2,600 hours as a civilian. As an airman between 1969 and 1973, he flew 800 hours in F-4 Phantoms based out of Okinawa.

Buck, his partner in the hangar, also builds kit planes and is the owner of Spokane Powersports.