Hello Club members, I hope all members are doing well and staying healthy. Here we are at the end of May and our club meeting is this weekend, so I hope a lot of our members come out and join us for this day. We have a lot to discuss with our members on what we have for the future of the club. This Saturday Jim Bonnardel who is our event coordinator will be having the famous Bomb Drop, so be sure you get out to the field and join the fun with rest of our members.
This past month our field was closed due to the KOZ event and it appears that some of our chairs grew legs and walked away. Unfortunately, we did not get them back. The club asks if any of our member have purchased new chairs for their backyard, I ask if you can donate your old chairs and bring them to the field. It sure would be greatly appreciated if you could. Funny part of this, the blue chairs were not taken, that because they are heavy to move around, so at least we still have those. We just lost all the smaller plastic chairs and the nice outdoor chairs.
Not sure if any of you heard about “Red Bull Airplane Swap” which did not work out as planned. This event happened on April 24th.
Sunday’s, vigorously promoted Red Bull Plane Swap missed the mark in more ways than one. Not only did the swap fail, but the maneuver and resulting aircraft crash irked the FAA, which said it “will investigate Sunday evenings attempted Red Bull Plane Swap in Arizona.”
The agency also said that on Friday it “denied the organizer’s request for an exemption from Federal regulations that cover the safe operation of an aircraft.” In the planned swap, which was live streamed on Hulu, pilots and skydivers Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington were scheduled to fly two Cessna 182s to an altitude more than 12,000 feet above the Arizona desert, put the aircraft into steep dives, jump out, and maneuver in freefall in order to enter each other’s airplane. They would then recover from the dive and land.
Both men were wearing parachutes.
The aircraft were modified with a range of equipment including aerodynamic brakes to keep them from gaining excessive speed in the near-vertical dive, and grab bars to help Aikins and Farrington get back into the airplanes during the plunge. The 182s each included a custom autopilot designed to maintain an unusually steep descent path.
Shortly after the 182s began their dive together, side by side, the airplane that Farrington was supposed to recover entered a spin, making it impossible for him to gain entry. Aikins successfully completed his half of the swap and landed the airplane safely. Farrington had to deploy his parachute. The 182 he was supposed to get into impacted the ground in a near vertical orientation in the desert. Officials reported no injuries.
It is unclear what caused one of the 182s to spin out of control. It is also unclear exactly where the accident aircraft—which reportedly was fitted with a Cirrus-style airframe parachute—wound up. I wonder if they will try this again!!!!
Not too long ago I walked over to the Rotorplex field and saw that a couple of guys were getting ready to fly their drones. I had asked if they were club member and they both said no. I asked if they had AMA and one of them said yes. I asked to see it and he then told me he had a pdf of the AMA card. I said ok but I need to see it. His next response to me was, what is AMA. At that point I knew he did not have one. What he did have was TRUST. But we all know that is not enough to fly at our site. I told them that if he did have AMA, I would allow them to fly as a guest. Get your AMA and join the club then you can fly as often as you like, but since they did not have AMA, I told them that they could not fly. They did pack they drones and stuck around for while to watch our T-28 races. Steve Neu will have more on that in this newsletter.
Speaking of the T-28 races, Larry Kosta Jr was ready for his heat, so he took off and right away he was banking to the left, over the pit and what he did was hit my truck and did some major damage to the truck as you can see in the photos….Ok, I lied about the major damage, but he’s got some polishing to on the shell and the bed of my truck to do……lol.
I hope club members have been following along my build of the DC-3 these past few articles and been enjoying the build as much as I have. I would like to let you know that if you come out this Saturday to our club meeting I will be bring the fuselage for all to see the model. The next few mouths the wing will be built and I’m not sure how much time I will be building on, since I just got a new job working for Collins Aerospace which begins this coming June 6th. In the time I will have, I will be building up the wing.
Thank you all and I look forward to seeing you all out at the field!
