We also agreed to move our annual club picnic to the same weekend as the airshow. The show is on Saturday and the picnic will be on Sunday. This way the whole family can enjoy a fun weekend at the airport. Ken will get to spend the whole weekend with us so he should be at our picnic and meeting on Sunday too.
We will have a lot of work to do this time around, so all members will be needed to rotate working the booths at the airshow. We are also going to look into the possibility of doing an all gyroplane fly-by during the show; the more the better! This should be one exciting weekend to look forward to. Be sure to mark the last weekend of June on your 1999 calendars now!
The October Chapter 5 meeting was held at the Marysville Airport on the 25th. We were back to our normal attendance with several visitors including a gentleman from Arizona. He had flown in with Gary from the Nut Tree Airport and was visiting to get some gyro flight time in to see if they are really for him.
As mentioned last month, Tom Sled just joined the club and is working on a green Bandit. I checked out the instrument panel on this machine after the meeting and it is loaded! I was amazed at how many instruments Tom has neatly fit into the new Bandit's panel.
Speaking of panels, I spent several hours looking into the panel possibilities for my RAF 2000 and finally faxed the layout to the factory where they will soon engrave it on a mill.
The project is still in Canada where Rotary Air Force is at work on getting all the parts in order and ready to ship. In the meantime, I've found plenty to do just in getting ready for it. If building the gyroplane is as exciting as preparing for it to arrive, then this is going to be one fun project! The garage space is now nicely cleared out awaiting the arrival of the large crates. Some dollars have been turning into tools that will be needed for the construction. If all goes well, the kit should arrive a couple weeks before Christmas. The ultimate Christmas present!
Another topic of discussion at the meeting was possible "consumer testing" by the club. There appears to be some "stretching of the truth" being done by some manufacturers. It would be nice if someone could do unbiased testing to confirm or deny the advertising claims to help prospective buyers make more informed decisions. The group all agreed we need to promote truth in the sport.
However, there are a lot of legal and technical details that would need resolved to successfully pull this off. Things like do we have enough equipment to record the data? Enough testing expertise? How do you do and pay for testing for far-away vendors? Don't forget to adjust everything for non-standard conditions! I think this may remain a hot topic of discussion next time around.
The next meeting of P.R.A. Chapter 5 will be November 22, 1998 at 1 pm, Nut Tree Airport, Vacaville. Be there!