While walking around and enjoying the displays, I happened on to the West Coast Gyroplanes booth. Gary Brewer had a show-time special deal there that I just could not pass up. So I signed the contract and put my hard-earned money down on an RAF 2000 GTX SE gyroplane! Well, OK, so I had been planning to make this purchase for a while. But my finances had just come together the week before so the timing couldn't have been any better. I've been dreaming of building this gyro for over a year and now the ball is finally rolling. I should now have some actual building progress to report on and hopefully some test flights to talk about later next year after I do some training with Gary. I'm really looking forward to this project. For now, I'm just getting the garage prepared; I will be spending a lot of time there over the next several months.
Saturday, October 3rd, I went to the Alex G. Spanos "Wings Over Stockton" Airshow. Wow, this was the place to be if you like air shows! I arrived at 9am and was already looking up in the sky. There was something flying and showing off almost non-stop all day long until the headlining spectacular performance by the US Navy's Blue Angels. Other appearances included well-known names like Bob Hoover, Eddie Andreini, the US Army's Golden Knights parachute team, the Northern Lights, and many more. The stealth fighter and bomber each did several fly-bys. There was even a night airshow after dark with fireworks on the airplanes and a pyrotechnics display from the ground. An incredible airshow; don't miss it next time!
Because of the Fly-Ins, September's Chapter 5 meeting was held one week early on the 20th at Vacaville. There was low attendance, likely also due to Fly-In plans and other activities.
As I predicted last month, we got to hear about the initial flights of Joe's new ultralight Bandit. Joe reports the lighter machine is just as stable as the others and lifts off at only 20 to 25 MPH. On landing, it seems to want to keep on flying! This should prove a successful machine for Part 103 operations.
It was a pretty brief meeting due to the low attendance. Hopefully attendance will be back to normal next time. The next meeting of P.R.A. Chapter 5 will be October 25, 1998 at 1 pm, Yuba County Airport, Marysville. See you there!