Monique Gentry & Steph Brown’s RV-10 | Temora New South Wales, Australia RV-10 #42598

The Gentry and Brown RV-10 has flown! But there’s more to the story:

One couple moving across states in Australia to build their dream, an RV-10.

Why move? A number of reasons: The house in Perth Western Australia was not big enough and no real carport that was sealed. The nearest airport was 40 km (24 miles) of highways and lots of cars away.

So we moved to Temora in New South Wales (West Coast to East Coast) living on the airfield, hangar/house (walk through kitchen door into the hangar) halfway between respective families.

Why an RV-10? Well simply one of us is a FF (fat f…r) but more to the point we wanted a cross-country flyer with great range of 1,600 nm. Yes we know the bladders won’t last that long but these are the distances we are faced with.

We ordered all the kits (slowbuild), engine, and prop at the same time. They arrived in September 2022, and we spent 3 days doing the inventory. Then we packed it all away until the end of September 2023, when we had completed building the hangar and the house.

We found that during COVID the costs of building the house/hangar went through the roof and we blew our budget, causing us to go back to work, one of us full time and one of us part time.

At our airpark we have fantastic people/resources to help achieve our goal. One of our resources was Simon Pike, who is apparently well known to the Van’s family.

On the 20th November 2025 , 2 years, 2 months and a couple of days after we started, we finished construction and then started working on setting up the avionics thanks to the Advanced Flight Systems team. What a superb product!

On the 23rd of December, VH-8MS (currently known as the grey ghost) with Simon at the controls, took to the skies over Temora. OMG, emotions ran wild.

Many thanks to the Van’s team and the RV-10 page on “the book of face,” plus Mal & Simon for all your help.