A retired New Jersey schoolteacher has made genuine local waves after spending four full years building a completely custom, one of a kind aircraft right on his own Ocean County property. Dick Newman’s four year project stands out not simply because of the sheer dedication it took to complete, but because of exactly who the finished aircraft was built for, Jessica Cox, an Arizona native who holds the Guinness World Record as the world’s first licensed armless pilot.
Cox, who was born without arms, has built a genuinely remarkable flying career using her feet to control every aspect of an aircraft, historically piloting a vintage 1940s ERCO Ercoupe, a rare plane originally designed without rudder pedals, which allowed her to steer, manage the throttle, and operate the radio entirely with her feet. That vintage aircraft, however, came with a genuinely significant limitation. It capped her flying range to roughly 50 miles around her home, since no modern aircraft existed that had ever been engineered to safely accommodate an armless pilot flying longer distances. That gap left Cox, despite her extraordinary skill and record setting achievement, genuinely restricted in how far her own flying career could actually take her.
The path toward solving that problem began after Cox’s vintage plane suffered mechanical issues while she was on the East Coast, leading her to connect with local aviation enthusiasts in the region. Dick Newman, a retired local teacher and member of the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Chapter 898, stepped forward and agreed to lead an entirely new construction project directly out of his own property, setting in motion what would become a four year undertaking built specifically around Cox’s unique needs as a pilot.
The resulting aircraft has been officially dubbed The Impossible Airplane, a name that captures both the technical challenge involved and the genuine unlikelihood of the entire project succeeding in the first place. Newman, working alongside a dedicated team of New Jersey volunteers, took a standard four seat Van’s Aircraft RV-10 kit and completely re-engineered it from the ground up. Rather than relying on the traditional hand controls that define virtually every modern aircraft cockpit, the plane features intuitive, custom foot controlled modifications designed specifically to match Cox’s own flying technique, translating the same skill she developed flying her vintage Ercoupe into a fully modern airframe capable of considerably more demanding flight.
Once fully completed and certified over the coming six months, the aircraft is expected to expand Cox’s effective flying range from that original 50 mile limitation to virtually anywhere across North America, a transformation that carries genuine significance well beyond personal convenience. Cox has built an international career as a motivational speaker and disability rights advocate, and her previous flying limitations meant her own aircraft could never fully keep pace with the geographic demands of that work. With a modern, long range plane finally built specifically around her own piloting method, Cox stands to gain a genuinely meaningful new tool for continuing that advocacy work directly, flying herself to engagements across the country rather than depending entirely on commercial travel to reach the audiences she speaks to.
For Newman and the volunteers who spent four years bringing The Impossible Airplane to life, the project stands as a genuine testament to what a small, dedicated group of aviation enthusiasts working out of a New Jersey backyard can accomplish when they set out to solve a problem no manufacturer had ever previously attempted to address. With certification now just months away, Cox’s expanded flying range promises to carry the story of this New Jersey built aircraft considerably further than the state’s own borders, quite literally, as she takes to the skies over the rest of the continent in a plane built entirely around proving that her own remarkable flying ability deserved an aircraft finally capable of matching it.
