Zubair Khan during the first taxiing of his plane at Brookhaven Calabro Airport in February. (Credit: YouTube)
When Zubair Khan first set out in February 2012 to convert a twin-engine CoZy aircraft into one with a larger single engine, he was met with skepticism from like-minded individuals on an online aviation message board.
“Zubair, my friend, there is going to be a lot there that is harder than you think,” one man wrote the day after Mr. Khan purchased his plane from a pilot who had abandoned a similar project in Oregon.
Mr. Khan responded with the same enthusiasm he often displayed on the message board while documenting his 25-month journey from purchasing the plane and converting into an amateur-built fixed-wing Raven powered by a Lycoming engine to taking it on its first test flight in March.
“I am glad you brought this up,” the West Village resident wrote. “I did ask a lot of canard builders and experts before jumping into this, and pretty much everyone told me to stay away from it. But I couldn’t.”
He concluded his response by writing: “I am so new to all of this that I am pretty much depending on these comments to save my life.”
Mr. Khan, 41, was identified Monday afternoon as the pilot killed when he crashed his experimental aircraft into the Long Island Sound off the Mattituck shoreline during a test flight from Brookhaven Calabro Airport in Shirley. His first test flight with the aircraft was on March 15, according to his message board posts.
Mr. Khan was an unmarried native of Afghanistan who came to New York City along with one of his brothers while the rest of his family stayed behind, according to a fellow pilot who had advised him on his project over the past two years. He was the vice president of a financial software company who had worked on projects for several major international banks in recent years, according to his online resumé on LinkedIn. He earned his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1999.
Several phone calls to Mr. Khan’s home in New York City went unanswered Monday.