Bibrak Qamar Chandio
bibrakc [at] gmail [dot] com
I grew up in Dadu, a small town in Sindh, in the federation of Pakistan. I completed a PhD in parallel computing systems in the United States. Along the way I picked up what I can only describe as a very American habit: building an airplane in the garage.
It started in 2018 during an internship at AMD Research in Austin, Texas, where I met a senior engineer who had built his own Van's RV-9. That conversation changed the direction of things. I got my private pilot certificate in Bloomington, Indiana in 2021, and in 2026 I started building a Van's RV-8 in Cupertino, California.
In America, building your own airplane is a normal thing to do. There are hundreds of thousands of homebuilders, EAA chapters in every state, and a culture of people who simply decide to build something that flies. That culture does not exist in most of the world.
This site is a record of the build. The work, the mistakes, the tools, the people who helped, and the slow accumulation of hours.
The Aircraft
The Van's RV-8 was designed by Richard VanGrunsven. It is a two-seat, tandem-configuration, tailwheel aircraft that is fully aerobatic, capable of loops, rolls, and other maneuvers. It is offered as a kit with thousands of small parts, blueprint drawings, and build/assembly instructions. You build it yourself, in your garage, over several thousand hours.
The Workshop
The workshop is currently in my living room and garage in Cupertino, California. The empennage parts are small enough to work on indoors. As the build progresses to larger sections like the wings and fuselage, I will need more space.