Last month, a snappy small white airplane with red and blue stripes landed at Lancaster Airport. Inside were pilot Gary Leinberger and his wife, Susan. Leinberger built the entire airplane himself. It took him nine and a half years.

"I have been excited about flying since I was 12," says Leinberger, who grew up in Upper Darby. He had hoped to join the Air Force after graduating from high school, but did not meet the vision requirements. He joined the ROTC at Lehigh University, graduating in 1970. After training in the US, he was sent to Germany as a tank platoon leader. There, he joined a German glider club where the instructor, a former POW, spoke excellent English and taught him well.

Leinberger was in the air at last, but he still wanted to learn to fly a plane with a motor. Returning to the States in 1977, he joined a United States flying club, and received his license for motor airplanes. After earning his doctorate in finance in 1983 from the University of Oklahoma, he came to Lancaster to teach at Franklin & Marshall College.

 Leinberger bought an airplane kit in 2003: an English "Europa XS High Top" for $33,000. His brother Pete also liked airplanes. On Pete's farm in West Chester, the two men built a workshop and an airfield. For the next five years Leinberger worked on the plane in his spare time.

He already had a "store-bought" plane, a one-seater Kitfox. He took care to keep flying while he was working on the plane.

"Some people are so busy building a plane that they don't keep flying and they lose their skills," he says.

At times Leinberger paid people to supervise him. Some parts of the work needed two pairs of hands. Other tasks required a particular expertise — rigging the plane properly, for example. After the death of Leinberger's brother in 2008, the farm was sold. Leinberger felt "over my head." He shipped the unfinished plane to Custom Flight Creators in Tampa, Fla., which had special tools and a supervisor, Bud Yerley, a former Air Force pilot. During the next four years Leinberger worked at least 150 days with Yerley, often working for 14 hours at a time, Leinberger recalls.

At last it was time to test the plane. There are innumerable FAA rules for "amateur-built airplanes," as they are called. Leinberger also followed his own rules of preparation: "Do everything twice and learn a lot of patience." He kept a log book with pictures of each step and descriptions of what he did. He filled out multiple forms and found that he was well in excess of the requirements.

Leinberger, now associate professor of finance at Millersville University, compared a test flight to finance.

"Finance is risk-management," he says. "You must get rid of as much risk as you can. And then it's time to go."

Leinberger had never flown that type of plane, so he set out a series of steps to reduce risk. He paid a test pilot, Yerley, to fly the plane the first time.

Yerley flew the plane for 30 minutes and came down, proclaiming, "No runs, no drips, no errors." Yerley next flew it for 2 1/2 hours to ensure it would fly properly in all situations. Then Leinberger flew with Yerley for seven hours in a similar plane in order to learn the procedures. They flew together in Leinberger's plane for another two hours. At last, a week later, Leinberger took off alone and all was well.

"It was so routine, it was amazing," he says.

Leinberger has his own personal rules in addition to the FAA rules. For instance, even though he is licensed to fly in clouds, he never takes off unless he has 1,500 feet of clear air below the clouds. He never flies low and never flies over towns, he adds.

"This is risk-management," he explains. "If you are high, you have extra minutes to take care of problems."

Now 65 years old, he has been flying since he was 23. In all those years he has had just three emergency landings: twice in gliders and once when his engine stopped. In those instances, Leinberger just picked a field and set it down.

 "If you are flying at 1,500 feet, three and a half minutes can fix a lot of things," he said. "Once you have made a decision, keep it. If you have picked a field and suddenly see what you think is a better field, that is when you crash."

Back at Lancaster Airport, one side of the plane carries red letters that spell Gary; on the other side, Susan. Gary's wife loves flying and she, too, is taking pilot training.

They plan to return the plane to Tampa in January and then fly all over the country with stops at Mackinac Island and Minneapolis. They'll conclude at the Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in at Oshkosh, Wis., in summer, attended by 350,000 enthusiasts.

"I'm still excited about flying," Leinberger says.