I, too, would like to see the break down between builder and second owner, and add those airplanes built by hired guns for pilots with more money than time.

Another interesting data point would be flight time, both total, last 30 to 90 days, and time in type. The old saw is that builders are too busy working to fly, until their project is done.

To be honest, mechanical ability doesn’t have a lot to do with building and airplane today because most of them are precut and drilled kits. Perhaps more imporant is attention to detail, like making sure you clean all of the crap out of a fuel tank before you Proseal it shut.

It will be interesting to see how the homebuilding community addresses this problem, and I’ll keep an eye on it.

One thing I would like to see analyzed is the experimental crash rate in builder/operator versus purchaser/operator incidents. Personally, I wonder how many of these accidents are caused by pilots purchasing the ‘hottest, fastest, newest’ homebuilt that was completed by someone else, thereby eliminating the working knowledge of the aircraft’s construction and systems. Another thing to think about is how many builders are, what you may call, mechanically-inclined or not.