Fred is an award-winning, internationally known builder of experimental aircraft. He was raised around the airplanes owned by his father, a Cynthiana farmer, and his uncles, who ran a Lexington cropdusting operation. An avid model-builder, Keller started building composite aircraft after he moved to Alaska following military service in Vietnam. In 1973, Keller's Volkswagen-powered KR-1 took Best Auto-powered Homebuilt honors at the EAA Fly-in at Oshkosh. Five years later, his VariEze won the Best of Class as well as the Outstanding Workmanship Award. He refinished and further refined the VariEze, and it won Grand Champion Homebuilt in 1980, and the Wright Brothers Award at Dayton, Ohio, in 1981. In 1980, famed designer Burt Rutan selected Keller to build his newest aircraft. Using only notes, shop drawings and photos of the prototype, Keller built Burt Rutan's first Defiant. In 1989 Keller conceived the Prospector, a short take-off and landing capability; high performance; fuel capacity "to get there and back;" seat (and sleep) two; good visibility; good bush clearance; a fuselage capable of carrying 12-foot boards; and a wide CG range that would accommodate all that fuel and cargo. To design his new aircraft, Keller took two semesters of college algebra. Keller and his wife flew it the 3,500 miles from Anchorage to Oshkosh, where the judges briefly saw it intact. Then, on a photo flight, the fuel gauge misread and Keller was forced into an emergency landing. In the rapid deceleration, the tail came up and Prospector came to rest "butter-side down" in a wheat field. As Keller repaired and rebuilt, judges had the uncommon opportunity to see the underpinnings of his work, which were just as exacting as the exteriors. And on the final day of the 1989 EAA convention, the Prospector, N4XK, took Grand Champion, Plans-built homebuilt.