Cleared for Takeoff
Julian Joffe builds his own airplane.
Written by Brian Bushard
Photography by Kit Noble
Julian Joffe’s hangar at Nantucket Memorial Airport is more of a workshop, if anything. For the past three summers, Joffe, a Nantucket summer resident and former CEO of a Vermont-based manufacturing company, has been meticulously assembling the thousands of pieces that came in a box the day he decided to build his own airplane. While he might just be one of dozens of amateur pilots on the island, he’s the only one who has gone the extra mile of building his own plane, a tedious project that completely transformed not only his hangar, but his approach to aviation. It’s the first experimental airplane built on Nantucket in decades.
"Some people do this because it’s a less expensive way to get into flying, but for me, I’m retired, I love building s**t, and so I did it,” he said. “When you choose a plane, you have to decide what your vision is. Do you take people on angel flights across the country, do you fly for business all over the place, do you buzz around or do you fly for the fun of it? I fly because I want to keep my hand in aviation until the day I die, which hopefully won’t be at the hands of an airplane.”
The project took Joffe one and a half years to complete, divided over three summers, almost exclusively inside his hangar. Every piece of the plane arrived in a wooden crate, from the wings to the propeller to the landing gear. Except for the fuselage, every part of the airplane was at some point sitting on the shelf, with checkpoints marked on an owner’s manual and parts listed in an internal numerical system Joffe devised specifically for the project. Being a manager at an engineering company and logging 3,000 hours as a pilot turned out to be enough practice to build an airplane. He wasn’t flying by the seat of his pants. “I’m very mechanical,” he said.
In some ways, flying has taken Joffe to new heights. It’s also nearly cost him his life. Just a few days before Easter in 2015, Joffe couldn’t help but notice the storm system making its way through upstate New York. Joffe had been planning on flying his Beechcraft Bonanza A36 aircraft with his wife to visit their children in Georgia for the holiday, but looking at the forecast, he thought better of flying the single-propeller plane into the oncoming storm, so he left one day early. It was a decision that saved his life.
Only 45 minutes into the flight, just as Joffe had passed over Albany airspace, he heard an unusual thumping sound that made his stomach drop. “Suddenly the engine sounded like a washer-dryer on tumble dry, just ‘thump, thump,’” Joffe said. “I had about six minutes to figure out what we were going to do.” Had the engine failure happened one day later—the day he had planned on flying—he would have been sent spiraling downward in a storm with near-zero visibility. But his was a sunny day, and in those six minutes, he searched desperately for a safe place to land.
“With no visibility, if you’re coming down without an engine and you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going to crash into something very hard and die,” he said. “But this way, I was able to find a valley. I looked down, saw narrow roads and trees. And then close by was a big open field tucked into a valley. I left the gear up so I could land without flipping over, and it was a perfect landing. I could have had my seatbelt off.”
Joffe’s Beechcraft Bonanza skidded for about a quarter mile in a field in the Catskills before coming to a stop in front of a group of three dozen grazing deer. Neither Joffe or his wife, Kerry Joffe, were injured in the crash. The couple walked away from the plane without so much as a scratch. The cause of the crash was later determined to be a loose lug nut. “The sun came out and the first thing I thought was, ‘Are we in heaven?’” Kerry Joffe said.
Julian Joffe purchased another plane after the Beechcraft crash—a six-seat Piper Meridian M500 turboprop that was too wide to fit in his hangar at Nantucket Memorial Airport. But he didn’t end up getting much use out of it—he assures me it wasn’t because of the plane crash just years earlier. At a certain point, Joffe—an engineer by practice and a lifetime aviation enthusiast—decided it was time to take flying into his own hands in a completely new way. So in 2022, he purchased the pieces to the brand-new 23-foot Carbon Cub that he would assemble himself in the hangar.
"I'm not into cars. Building a car is not something I ever entertained doing. Plus, the challenge of flying a [back-heavy] tail dragger was something I wanted to achieve. Flying this plane is much more intense than flying any other plane,” Joffe said. “Flying is not a physical thing. It’s not like surfing; there’s no muscle memory. It’s all about understanding what’s happening in the plane, and the more you read or the more videos you watch, the more you learn about the art of flying. It’s not a science at all."
Three summers later, Joffe estimates the project is 99.99% completed. After driving the plane on the taxiway, all he has left is a final registration and inspection through the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as a flight by a test pilot, before he can take it in the air. Once he’s airborne, he can hit a maximum cruising speed of 140 mph and a maximum altitude of 14,000 feet for a 700-mile trip on 35 gallons of fuel.
And if there was any fear of crashing, Joffe can rest assured he’s in control of every piece of the plane, down to the last lug nut. “If I get scared, I just get focused,” he said. “When you panic, your brain goes into a neutral mode and you don’t think, and instincts take over. But flying is a fun thing to do. Flying this plane is special, if you can achieve something as challenging as this. This plane is a different ballgame.”
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