Meet Vero Beach Aviation Pioneer Roy Pinner

“It looks scary, doesn’t it?” Roy Pinner is pointing to a picture on the wall in his office inside the airplane hangar that sits a few dozen yards from his home. The plane in the picture, a Drifter ultralight, looks like the plane a daredevil stranded on a desert island with only a legless lawn chair, a couple of old wheelbarrow wheels, and some leftover fabric from a ship’s sail might build before flying cheerfully off on his next adventure.

In other words, it’s beautiful. Floorless, roofless, cockpit-less, and mostly made of air, it’s the closest a human can come to flapping his wings, getting a running start, and soaring into the wild blue yonder. It’s also the first plane that Vero Beach resident and Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Hall of Fame inductee Roy Pinner ever built, and just beyond Pinner’s office, it’s hanging from the ceiling. Someday, it will be on display in the EAA Aviation Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Actually, the Drifter was not really the first airplane Pinner ever built. When he was 8 years old, workers at a construction site near his home in Drayton Plains, Michigan unwittingly launched his aviation career by leaving their empty pop bottles lying around. Pop bottles were as good as cash to an enterprising youngster in 1950, and Pinner took his loot to the local dime store and bought a rubber band–powered balsa wood plane, the A-J Hornet from American Junior.

“I started flying balsa wood airplanes, and then I started building balsa wood airplanes,” Pinner explains, and so began his lifelong education in aerodynamics. “The nice thing about models,” he says, “was you flew it, and if it wasn’t right it crashed, and well, you just built another one.” Along the way, “you figure out a lot of stuff.”

As he grew up, he progressed from building balsa wood models to control-line planes, engine-powered models attached to a line, which you flew by walking in a circle. From there, Pinner began building radio controlled planes and got “pretty serious.” He flew in competitions “all over most of the eastern half of the United States, from Florida, Michigan … wherever they had airplane contests, we went.” He ended up competing in the United States Radio Control Aerobatic Masters Tournament, where he missed qualifying for the U.S. team.

When he wasn’t building airplanes, Pinner was busy making his living as an electrical contractor in Detroit and raising four sons with his wife, Rocky. When business started to dry up in the early 1980s, Pinner “packed up wife and kids and moved to Florida and started all over.” He remembers thinking, “If I’m going to starve to death, I’m not going to freeze to death.”

A house for sale in the Indian River Aerodrome neighborhood first drew the Pinners to the fly-in community west of town where most homeowners have planes and can land them on the community’s private airstrip. Pinner recalls turning to his wife and telling her, “I’m going to live here.”

Apparently, some delicate spousal negotiations were required to close the deal, but in the end, the Pinners built a house in the Aerodrome and launched Roy’s Electrical Service, a successful local business now run by their son Troy.

But how does one go from being a serious, competitive model airplane builder to the Hall of Fame? Apparently, the first step is to support your children’s activities. At one of his son’s ski meets in Michigan, “some guy jumped off the top of a hill with a hang glider,” and Pinner thought, “Wow, that’s really cool.”

Then he saw a motored version—an ultralight aircraft—and decided he wanted to try to build one. He found a company that sold a kit, so he “bought it and built it and flew it.” That first plane, he said, just “yawed around the sky. It wasn’t really super-controllable for windy conditions.”

During all the years spent building and flying model planes, Pinner had “built up quite an extensive knowledge of aerodynamics.” That understanding gave him the confidence to design a better ultralight. He developed the design after models he’d built that flew really well, putting “ailerons and a cruciform tail on it” to make it controllable, even in windy conditions. Numerous other design decisions and trade-offs had to be made to meet FAA requirements and achieve the flyability Pinner was after.

When it was complete, the plane was named EAA Ultralight Grand Champion in 1983. Pinner sold the design, and today Lockwood Aircraft in Sebring still produces the “Double Drifter,” a “two-place” or two-seater version of the original. “They send kits all over the world,” Pinner says. “I have photos of that airplane flying by Mount Fuji in Japan, in Australia, Africa.”

He didn’t stop with the Drifter. Pinner has built seaplanes (the best for “all-out fun”), and “go-fast” planes (“like flying a little fighter plane” at more than 200 miles per hour), and he’s currently at work on his 11th, a STOL, which stands for short take-off and landing. It’s designed for flying in the outback, where it can be airborne within 15 to 20 feet and fully stopped within 9 or 10 feet of touchdown. “Every plane is designed around a mission,” he explains. It usually takes two to two and a half years to build a plane. When they’re finished, he’ll fly them for a year or so, then sell them to finance the next one.

While most of Pinner’s planes were built from kits—no small feat in itself—he built the Drifter and the Double Drifter completely from scratch, designing and building every element himself. He bent the aluminum, stretched and glued the fabric, and even built the electronic control systems. An oversize, impeccable sketchbook is filled with page after page of drawings, specifications, and calculations—“flap dams, gas tank mounts, air dams, wing platform …”—each labeled, dated, and signed. “As built” drawings document changes made during construction, in case a piece ever needs to be replaced. His design set a new standard in ultralight aviation.

In 2009, Pinner was recognized for that work. In a letter that he almost threw away (“I thought it was junk mail!” he says), Pinner learned that he would be inducted into the EAA Ultralight Hall of Fame. He was honored for his “contributions to the history, development, and growth of ultralight aviation.” He joined a “select few whose visionary talents carved a unique niche in the history of manned flight.” 

If it’s true that a man is judged by the company he keeps, it is worth noting that “pilot’s pilot” Bob Hoover, the World War II flying ace who famously escaped a Nazi prison camp by nabbing an airplane and flying across the border, flew chase behind Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier, and was remembered by Smithsonian Magazine as “one of the greatest pilots who ever flew,” was inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Pinner. Standing at the speaker’s podium that night was Jeff Styles, copilot to Captain “Sully” Sullenberger when he managed to land a damaged plane and all its passengers safely on the Hudson River.

Pinner is both deeply moved and humbled by the recognition. “Some people are born with music and some people are born mechanical gearheads, and that’s me,” he says. “That’s just who I am.” At 84, Pinner plans to keep designing, building, and flying airplanes. He cranks open the door to the hangar and looks out over the airstrip. “Pretty cool place to live,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade it for nothing.”