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Table of Contents

• President's Report for May
  • Watonga Fly-in
  • EAA 10 Spring Picnic
  
  
• Seen on the Web
  • BD-5 Wanted
  • Radial powered motorcyle
  
  
• Helpful Hints: Painting
• My Most Excellent Flying Adventure
• The Aviation Career of Jack Rhodes, Tignall, GA
  
  
• Items For Sale
• 2007 Calendar Of Events
• Who Brings Snacks????
• Web Page Newsletter

President's Report for May

by Bhrent Waddell

Spring is here at last, and I’m anxious to fly. However, just like this winter, the weather isn’t cooperating. The rain has made the grass taxiways and runways way too soft. I know summer’s not too far off, so there is still hope.

Watonga Fly-in

If things dry out enough by Saturday, May 19, Watonga is having a fly-in and air show at Watonga Municipal Airport. If you didn’t get their flier, breakfast is free to fly-in participants (that’s a good way to get me interested). Randy Harris, Kyle Franklin and others will perform in an air show that starts after the field closes at 10:00a.m. There will be a drawing at 10:15 for a handheld radio. The runway will re-open at 2:00pm for departures. Since most of Oklahoma missed breakfast at Ponca City this month, this may be a good alternative. Ponca City only had 15 aircraft at the breakfast in May although they served 343.

EAA 10 Spring Picnic

Chapter 10’s Spring Picnic is Sunday, May 20. There will be no meeting on Monday night, May 21. Chapter 10 will furnish hamburgers, hotdogs and fixings. We'll start serving at 1:00pm. Members can bring side dishes and desserts to help balance the menu. If you can fly in, bring your plane - it’s a good time to let others check it out.

Summer Fly-Ins

There’s a conflict in scheduling this year on June 1st and 2nd between the National Bi-plane Expo in Bartlesville and EAA’s Southwest Regional Fly-in (SWRFI) in Hondo, TX. Both events have websites if you want to check them out. I’m glad to see that SWRFI will move to May 2nd and 3rd in 2008.

I appreciate Bob Thrasher presenting the program last month. With summer storms upon us, I felt that even veteran pilots could benefit from a weather refresher.

Lone Star Flight Museum Air Show Report

I had planned to go to Sun & Fun but had to change my plans. Last year I flew my RV-6 for the first time in January and by Memorial Day, I had flown it 40 hours. By May of this year, I had only flown it 2 hours! Out of frustration of missing Sun & Fun, I decided it would be a good time to check out Lone Star Flight Museum’s Air show on April 28. Their museum is located on the airport at Galveston, Texas.

Even though I arrived the night before at closing time, the FOB crew was very friendly and helped my get a car. I spent Saturday morning at Seawolf Park touring the submarine, USS Cavalla, the destroyer escort, USS Stewart, and other Galveston sites. The Lone Star Flight Museum lists the air show as a maximum effort to get flyable planes out of the hanger and into the air. The show started about noon with a B-52 flyover (belonging to the USAF, not the museum) followed by flights of some beautiful WWII Army and Navy planes. Other aircraft performing were an F-16, F-18, F-15 and even a fly-by of a B- 2. A Heritage Flight was made by a P-47, F-15 and F-16 formation. Inside the museum, I was surprised to see a beautiful B-58 Hustler. I’ve always loved the looks of the B-58 and was pleased to see such a well-preserved plane.

After the show, I was one of about a dozen planes that were all were ready to depart at about the same time. The tower controller sounded a bit pressed with all of the departure activity. I guess he hasn’t been to Oshkosh. For the return flight, the head winds were gone, and I was back home in a little less than three hours. The trip wasn’t as big as a Sun & Fun trip, but it was a great getaway.

I hope to see everyone at the picnic.

Bhrent

Seen on the Web

BD-5 Wanted

I have been interested… just interested, no money involved, in the BD-5 ever since I first saw one. So seeing a BD-5 email group on Yahoo Groups I joined. Again no money involved. The group moderator recently posted a message with the text of a message that is “…an example of the types of inquiries I receive.” I thought I would share it with you.

Richie Shroff

From: XXXXXXX
Date: Apr 17, 2007 4:48 AM
Subject: Interest in your BD5 2 seater
To: XXXXX@bd5.com

Radial Powered Motorcycle

Also on the web was this photograph.

Owning a vintage Warbird: Awesome Owning a radial powered motorcycle: Too cool Owning a warbird and a radial motorcycle: Priceless!

Helpful Hints: Painting

by Roger White

A little over fifty years ago I was bitten by the flying bug. Buying a plane of my own was out of the question, but I read in the “Letters to the Editor Column” in Flying magazine a note from Paul Poberezny about a small group of guys in Hales Corner, Wisconsin with a common interest in building their own airplanes. They called their group the Experimental Aircraft Association. They were truly experimenters. I wrote and asked if I could get their newsletter. I received a reply written by Bob Nolenski. He said to send them ten dollars and they would put me on their list.

Well, to shorten the story, I saw the possibility of actually building my own airplane. It took seven years of scrounging for parts and material, learning to weld, doing the woodwork, and all the other skills it took to build a “Cougar” airplane. In the process, I learned or came up with a lot of “tricks” to accomplish the completion of the Cougar.

Today, there are few scratch built, home built airplanes, so a lot of my experience wouldn't apply. Probably ninety percent or more of home built aircraft today are built from kits . Kit builders have the advantage of having detailed instructions along with the parts and materials to build with.

So much of my experience in now obsolete. If you can get any of Tony Bingillis’s books, you should read them. It will give you a lot of education and appreciation for the “old days” of home building.

I plan to write a short article on “tricks” for our newsletter occasionally that might have some application for today’s kit plane builder. Believe me, I envy you! Kit planes are generally better designed, easier to build, and safer to fly. Well, here is my first trick.

Painting

The actual application of paint by spray can or paint gun can be a real pain, especially when dealing with small parts. They keep blowing away. The solution is to build a frame of appropriate size to lay out a batch of parts that need to be painted. Cover the frame with wire mesh, and for larger parts, chicken wire will work. I have personally used “hardware cloth” most of the time. For tiny parts, use 1/4" or so grid and simply fold about an inch over along the edges of the mesh instead of using a frame.

Lay out your parts on the mesh and you will find that the air doesn’t get under the part and lift it. You can even leave the parts on the screen to dry, often times you can just turn them over to paint the other side. (Paint the back side first.) Don’t worry about cleaning the screen, just let the paint dry in place, and it will be ready for the next use.

If you have some “tricks” or helpful hints of your own, please send them to me or to our newsletter editor and we will get it into print for others to see.

Roger

My Most Excellent Flying Adventure

by Craig Loomiller

I have just returned from another try at glider racing. I first tried out this type of event two years ago in Moriarity, New Mexico where I just had a ball. Last year the competition was held in southwestern Utah where the logistics of getting there were just too great. This year the event moved to the southeastern corner of Tennessee at a place called Chilhowee, located about forty-five miles northeast of Chattanooga. This time there would be no holding me back, this was going to be my year.

I went all out in preparation for this event. That old 360 channel comm radio had to go and I needed a new secure data logger to track all my flights. Ok, I really didn’t need the data logger, but I really wanted it. I also decided that I needed a new Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) so that I could couple the GPS output from the data logger into a moving map display which would show me the way to go. Purchasing aviation items on the internet is a lot of fun until the credit card bills arrive in the mail. Now that I had all my new electronics, my old instrument panel wasn’t going to work any more so it had to come out. I ordered a couple of .060 aluminum blanks to fashion a new panel from. At the time I didn’t know why I ordered two, but I’m glad I did. Somewhere along the way, someone told me that you could cut out instrument panel holes with those bi-metal hole saws they sell at Home Depot. I found out after the first couple of holes that those “someones” were a bunch of liars. I really butchered it up. I went over to my neighbor Todd Evans and asked him what I should do. He said I needed to use his instrument hole cutter that he had bought at an auction several years ago. He was right. Using my pattern to lay out he holes on the new blank, I had the panel completely cut out in about 30 minutes. It is amazing what a difference using the right tool makes. I ended up getting all my new electronics hooked up just a couple of days before I was to supposed to leave. There would be no full checkout and familiarization of these new electronics until I actually arrived in Chilhowee for the races. I did not foresee any problems with this scenario because after all, what could go wrong.

Click any picture for larger version.

I loaded up my gear and set out on the thirteen hour drive to Chilhowee on Sunday just a little after noon. Why did I start out so late? The reason I started out so late is that I drove down and attended a wedding southwest of Fort Worth the day before. My stepson has always had perfect timing. No big deal though. I ended up arriving at the glider port Monday afternoon. The place was totally awesome. There was a 5,000 foot grass strip parallel to a twelve mile long ridge off about a half mile to the east. I had planned on working on my equipment and resting, but after seeing about six or seven gliders in a thermal directly over the ridge, I just had to go up. I ended up flying for a couple of hours just checking everything out. What a great place!

Tuesday was another practice day. Instead of a free fly day, we actually went out on a practice course. I did pretty good that day in that I finished the course and was able to land back at the home airport after covering about 40 miles in distance. The highlight this day was sharing a thermal with twelve other gliders. In this situation, you do not think about the mechanics of flying your aircraft, your entire focus is on not creating a mid-air collision. It actually turned out to be a lot of fun sharing the airspace with so many others.

Click any picture for larger version.

Wednesday was the first day of the competition, and wouldn’t you know it, I ended up drawing the number one starting position. The start is kind of cool. All twenty-seven gliders in the competition are lined up three abreast at the far end of the runway. Using four tow planes, you’re hooked up and moments later accelerating down the runway. They took you up to 2,000 feet and then dropped you off to fend for yourself. This whole process took about 50 minutes each day. We were to fly a thirty-five mile minimum task that took us to turnpoints both north and south of the airport. As I went out onto the course, I looked over to the east at a line of clouds over 3-4 ridges from our valley. To me, this looked like a cloud street. I decided to head over there and really get a leg up on the rest of the field since they had all stuck with flying in the valley. This turned out to be a really bad move on my part, Oklahoma aviators have no business flying over mountains in airplanes without engines. After several minutes over the mountains, I realized my mistake and proceed to get the heck out of there. I cleared the last ridge by at least a couple of hundred feet but then was unable to find any lift to keep me up. I was now looking for a place to land. I spotted a nice field probably five hundred yards long and set up for landing. The trees along the perimeter turned out to be about 90 feet tall, so I really had to slip my airplane in. Why do they always look so much shorter from the air? Carrying the extra speed upon landing, I felt that I was going to quickly run out of field. My only choice was to push full left rudder and hope for the best. The ground loop worked out pretty good in that I came to a stop without hitting anything..

The only bad thing to come out of this flight was that my total distance front the starting cylinder turned out to be 5.9 miles with ended up scoring me 56 points out of a 1,000 for the day. I ended up receiving the Yardstick Award for this flight. The Yardstick award is given to the pilot who scores the shortest scored flight of the contest. I am now a two-time winner of this award. A feat that I’m sure has never been duplicated before.

By the way, my electronics never did work quite right the whole time I was there, and I ended up not using the PDA at all. (editor’s note: If you liked this article and want to read more about my adventures in Tennessee, just let me know.)

Craig

The Aviation Career of Jack Rhodes, Tignall, GA

(Editor’s note: Chapter 10 member Terry Boswell sent along this article about an aviator that he found quite interesting.)

While traveling in eastern, central GA with my sister and her husband who are looking for a farm to move their cattle operation I chanced upon a Mr. Jack Rhodes, 83 years old, in Tignall, GA. My sister is interested in his for sale farm. From his quick wit and the twinkle in his eye I quickly learned he was a WW II fighter pilot of the P-47 variety. After all, you never need to ask a fighter pilot if he is one, he’ll tell you soon enough. Here is a bit of the story of his flying career.

Jack Rhodes

He was graduated from the local high school in 1940, the eldest of nine siblings. Unfortunately his father passed early so he moved to Augusta, GA and took a job as a helper in a sheet metal duct factory. When the war started he returned home with his enlistment papers but his mother would not sign them since he was only 16. Rather than enter the Navy she sent him to North Georgia Military College in Dahlonega for two years so he could earn a commission in the Army Air Corp. He studied hard for the first time in his academic career with the goal of being a pilot.

He completed basic training near Miami, FL and moved to Lakeland, FL for basic training in Stearmans. Then he took advanced training in the T-6 in Alabama. He next moved to Selma, AL for gunnery in the P-40 which could turn so tightly it would black you out from the G’s. There were no two-seat P-40s so your first flight was solo!

His initial assignment was to Hartford, CN in turbocharged P-47s as they prepared to escort B-17s. He said he had many a good look at NYC from up close.

Before his 21st birthday he was posted to France in late 1944. He joined a P-47 unit flying off pierced steel planking near the front. On his first day he flew a single sortie, dropped his two 500 lb. bombs, shot all three 4 inch rockets and strafed with his eight 50 caliber machine guns. There were lots of tracers in the air. The next morning he flew a similar sortie and landed for a quick turn because their base was only 10 minutes from the front. The next sortie that afternoon ended abruptly when his aircraft took multiple hits from AAA fire.

When he collected his wits he had bailed out and was hanging in a tree with about a dozen German soldiers pointing their rifles at him. He cut himself down and spent his 21st birthday as a POW. Because the front was moving so rapidly they were freed within a few weeks. He spent the next week with that Army unit chasing Germans until their commander sent them back to report in. This ended his illustrious flying career with 352 hours + 20 minutes and three combat sorties.

The esprit de corps he learned while flying is still with him. When our RV-10 is competed, we’ll give Jack a ride, he has earned it. Besides, he still has life by the short hairs!.

Items For Sale

To list your aviation items for sale, contact newsletter editor Craig Loomiller.

2007 Calendar Of Events

To add an item to our calendar, get the information to the newsletter editor Craig Loomiller. See the contact info on the home page for e-mail, phone, and mail addresses.

Recurring events

Who Brings Snacks????

Everyone! Since the Annual Chapter 10 Picnic is this month, we ask that everyone bring a covered dish, desert, or snacks to the picnic. The chapter will provide hot dogs, hamburgers, buns, and fixings.

Web Page Newsletter

If you would like to receive the newsletter electronically off of the chapter web site (www.eaa10.org) every month, just send Secretary Bob Thrasher or our web editor Bob Minich an e-mail. This action saves the chapter money on printing and mailing costs, which in turn, helps keep your dues low. It’s really simple to do. We send you a monthly e-mail notice when the latest newsletter is posted online. Just click on the provided link and you are there!

If you haven’t taken a look at our web page lately, you should check it out! Bob has started putting a picture of the author along side the articles, which really adds a lot to the newsletter. Many organizations have gone to an all-online newsletter which really reduces costs. Hopefully, we can get our own chapter moving in that same direction. We are supposed to be a progressive-thinking organization, after all.