Pilot was no mere tinkerer -- he built his own wings

PITTSBORO -- For Steve Goldman, the more impossible the challenge, the better. Particularly when it came to all things airborne.

In 1995, he and his wife, Gretchen Niver, moved to their dream house, a passive solar home on three acres on a private airstrip in Pittsboro. Goldman, who had his pilot's license, didn't own an airplane then. Even if he had, there was no place to keep it.

A few years later, he decided to rectify that and began work on a hangar, a 40- by 60-foot building with an adjacent observatory for the telescope he also planned to construct.

As a one-man show, it was slow going. Goldman and Niver usually threw an annual party, but in 2000, it was postponed because Goldman was so frustrated with the pace of his work.

A year later, the party finally took place. Invitations looked like old-fashioned paper airline tickets from FatCatAir, the pseudo-airline inspired by the couple's six cats.

"Capitalizing on the canceled party of the year before, we came up with the perfect slogan for the fledgling airline, Better Late Than Never," Goldman wrote at www. fatcatair.com. "That party was one of the best we have ever done. FatCatAir was off and flying with a life of its own."

Goldman juggled a lot of projects -- that's just the way he was. On June 30, he left many undone when he suffered an aortic aneurysm. He was 56 and on an Alaskan cruise with his family, hours from the nearest hospital, when he collapsed.

Goldman was born in Pittsburgh in 1952. His parents moved to Florida and started a construction company when he was in ninth grade. Though he never worked for the family business, he picked up the building gene.

The oldest of six children, Goldman was the only one who went to college. He attended Carnegie Mellon University and met Niver on his first day, during freshman orientation.

After he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, he and Niver moved to Florida. In 1976, they relocated to Cary, and Goldman got a master's degree in computer science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Most recently, Goldman worked as a software developer at Sun Microsystems.

But his after-hours job was flying.

Once the hangar and its observatory were finished, another person might have heaved a sigh of relief. To Goldman, the empty hangar spurred him to start his next project: building an airplane.

He began two years ago. The Velocity is a fast, highly technical, fiberglass craft that seats five. Goldman worked off factory plans, assembling piece by piece. He worked when his schedule allowed and had logged more than 800 construction hours. Still, the aircraft was less than half complete.

The Velocity has no tail, but it does have a canard, or elevator, that sits in front, which makes it appear to be flying backward. Its engine is in the back, and its rudder, normally on the tail, squats on the tip of each wing.

Up, up and away

Goldman liked defying gravity, liked the feeling of freedom when he was in the air. He was a hang- glider, too, which is how he first met Pat Hayes, his next-door neighbor at Eagles Landing.

In the 1980s, Goldman and Hayes took a trip to Chelan, Wash., a premier spot for hang- gliders, with its swaths of open land and rushing water.

Long before the Internet era in which arcane information can be found with a few clicks of a mouse, Goldman did extensive research about the baggage compartments of commercial airplanes. He measured the hang-gliders and determined they'd fit in the cargo holds.

When the men reached Raleigh-Durham International Airport, the ticket agents were baffled.