DIY in the Sky: Murphy Aircraft
Darryl Murphy just wanted to fly planes. Instead, he built his own, and today heads Murphy Aircraft, one of Canada's most renowned kit-plane manufacturers.
If you take a detour off Highway 1 onto Lickman Road, just west of Chilliwack, you’ll see a large grey building near a dead-end street with a small sign on the door modestly identifying it as Murphy Aircraft. Inside, the eponymous Darryl Murphy, 56, dressed in a T-shirt and worn jeans and sporting a 1950s crew cut, seems equally modest as he welcomes you into an office that looks like a hobbyist’s garage.
Collectible model cars – the kind kids used to pedal down the street – are displayed along with large aircraft models on ledges and on the floor. Bookshelves overflow with books, models and stacks of papers. Awards and framed photos cover the walls. A computer rises bravely from a desk awash in paper. It’s not what you’d expect to find in the nerve centre of one of Canada’s most renowned manufacturers of personal aircraft kits – until you hear the story of the company’s genesis.
To hear the deceptively casual Murphy describe it, his company’s success taps the passion at the heart of kit-plane enthusiasts. “It’s your baby,” says Murphy during a tour through his shop. “There’s nothing comparable to flying a plane you have built with your own hands and being able to say, ‘I aced this.’”
Inside observers of this tightly knit industry say Murphy is very well regarded. Tom Poberezny, president of the Experimental Aircraft Association, a Wisconsin-based international aviation organization with more than 170,000 members, says Murphy’s secret is simple: he found a way to share his passion. “Over the past 20 years, Darryl Murphy’s designs have helped thousands of people enjoy the spirit of aviation as they can create their own airplane and fulfill their own dreams of flight,” he says.
But it hasn’t always been blue skies.
Like Ray Kinsella, the main character in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Darryl Murphy followed his dream, living by the homespun philosophy, “Build it and they will come.” However, achieving his heart’s desire took a bit more time and work than simply ploughing up a cornfield.
In 1985 Murphy was working for a Vancouver glass-door company when he was badly injured in a hunting mishap. A friend’s gun accidentally discharged and the bullet ricocheted off a rock, piercing the floor of a truck in which Murphy was sitting. The impact catapulted him up to the roof of the cab and left a hole in his back the size of a fist. He was immobilized in hospital for four months. Bedridden, Murphy had to find something to pass the hours. To keep from going stir crazy, he began doodling.
“I had a lot of time on my hands with nothing to do, so I got some paper, pencils and a calculator and designed an airplane,” recalls Murphy. “I had done some hang gliding before but was told I would probably never run again.”
Designing an airplane didn’t come completely out of left field for Murphy, since he had grown up in a Royal Canadian Air Force family and had been around planes since childhood. After a shot at the air force himself (he failed the eye exam), Murphy completed his high-school education at 21 and then went on to get a degree as a mechanical engineering technologist. He applied this training to his work at the door-manufacturing company, where he designed equipment such as hydraulic lifts for showers for disabled people.
Even though he had never flown a plane, Murphy was fascinated by the idea of designing a biplane. “The biplane seemed like a good choice because it’s just a big truss and a relatively simple exercise structurally,” he says.
He left hospital on crutches with his biplane design in his pocket and a stubborn determination to build his aircraft. He started in his basement, then graduated to his carport, crafting every piece by hand, including the wood-form blocks. By the time his plane outgrew the carport, Murphy had serendipitously met a man at the airport who let him use his hangar to put on the finishing touches. Not knowing how to fly, Murphy let any pilot available take his plane for test runs. They flew it and praised it.
“One day I said to myself, ‘I should be able to fly this plane.’ So I went up and down the runway a number of times until I felt reasonably comfortable with it,” he says. “And then I went flying” (without a licence, which he later obtained).
Before long, people began to notice his plane and started asking him to build them one. So he put out a shingle and Murphy Aircraft Mfg. Ltd. was born.
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