Galt Traffic – September 2018

Pics of the Month (Sometimes, themes just happen!)

Planes on Posts…

Chapter Treasurer, Joe Feigel, took the above shot while driving thru Freeport, IL on Route 20.

Bill Marinangel spotted the 1/5th scale P51 on the right at a fly-in resort on Lake in the Woods in Canada.Bill says it’s bigger than it appears in the photos and serves as a wind indicator for local seaplanes.

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Question of the Month:

What’s your favorite Weather App?

Let’s know your preferences and thoughts.
We’ll put all the ideas into an informative article that opinions can be shared by EAA932 members. Who knows, maybe we’ll all end up with new favorites!

Email your response to editor@eaa932.org

• Have a bucketful of Clecos you’d really like to get rid of?
• Are you in need of a run-out propeller so that you can  make that wall clock for your spouse’s birthday?
• Do you have a perfectly useable Cirrus SR22 that you no longer need and would like to give to a good home?
(Call the editor if you do!)

You do realize that your junk might be – and hopefully is – someone else’s treasure.

Galt Traffic is here to help. Let our little newsletter help get the word out for you…FREE. Please, no for-profit business ads, just aviation-related stuff that may be of interest to other members. Trade it, sell it or give it away, we won’t judge. We’ll run your classified/want-ad for as long as we deem reasonable.

Let’s see how this works out!

Email your text and even a photo to editor@eaa932.org.

Dreams in the Wind?

Both Ecclesiastes and the Byrds have proclaimed “To everything there is a season…” I can’t help but think that two items recently in the news may have somehow passed their “use by” dates:

The StratoLaunch

The first comes by way of “Wired” with a story about the biggest aircraft ever built. What started out twenty-two years ago as the brainchild of Burt Rutan,  revered creator of “outside-the-box” designs, and was ultimately made possible with funding from Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has finally become a reality in 2018.

The design that Rutan had in mind was an aircraft capable of carrying vehicles to the outer edges of the atmosphere as a reliable and economical way of launching satellites into space. What was ultimately built over a 7 year period is a leviathan created of used engines, cockpit pieces, landing gear and electrical parts scavenged from 747’s with a wingspan of 385 feet.

Unfortunately, during those 7 years, Elon Musk created SpaceX and Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin. Both companies cut the costs of launching things into space by means of re-usable rockets. They’re just two of several innovative approaches to send things into “infinity and beyond!”

And the thing has yet to fly.

Maybe it will eventually find at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in Oregon alongside the Spruce Goose, another brainchild that became an instant anachronism.

The Sampson Switchblade

The perennial favorite of dubious usefulness showed up at AirVenture again this year. The roadable aircraft – or more popularly, the flying car – is regularly reincarnated in various forms.

The idea of flying cars goes way back to 1917, when Glenn Curtis created the Curtis Autoplane. Between then and now, numerous attempts have been made to creating a useable roadable aircraft, with none drawing any sustained interest among the general public.

Samson introduced its Switchblade idea to the world at AirVenture 2009. My memory is of an original concept that had wings telescoping out from the body, like those collapsable plastic cups that fascinated us as kids.

Fast forward to AirVenture 2018. The current iteration of the Switchblade has wings that fold forward into the body of its three-wheeled chassis. Unfortunately, the company couldn’t demonstrate this key feature, making the excuse that the battery wasn’t hooked up. Seriously guys? A decade of development and you couldn’t hook up the battery? I had jumper cables in my car that you could have borrowed.

And another thing, and maybe it’s just me, but aren’t those wings a little…uh, little? Lets just say that the Switchblade really flies: would I have to have the skills of a test pilot to land it?

It may have gone noticed, but the development of multi-rotor aircraft that don’t require runways seems to have pushed the idea of a flying car off to the side of the road. While the Switchblade offers the convenience of being able to transition from sky to road in the case of bad weather, to me, the ability of a multi-copter to take off from my driveway and land in the parking lot at work beats that hands down.

And, again, the thing has yet to fly.

I can’t help but wonder if the Switchblade, like the StratoLaunch, may have missed its window-of-opportunity.

Then again, my wife swears that the older I get, the more of a curmudgeon I become.

Enter the Blackfly

Speaking of “out-side-the-box” design, take a look at the Blackfly by a company named Opener. They showed up in the Innovation Center at AirVenture this year…and astounded everyone who looked at their creation.

The fact that something which, at first glance appears so ungainly, can actually fly so elegantly is stunning. Its transition from vertical to horizontal flight is utterly simple…and brilliant! The Blackfly was easily the most original personal aircraft at AirVenture 2018.

And yes…this one is already flying!

Photo courtesy of the Mariposa Gazette

Fight and Flight

We’ve all heard and seen reports of the devastation that wildfires have caused up and down the west coast this year. My wife and I have friends in Mariposa, CA who had to evacuate their home because of the Ferguson Fire that ravaged the area around Yosemite. Fortunately, the tireless efforts of fire crews have allowed them to return to a still-intact home. Then they received the devastating news that one of the firefighters that they knew personally had lost his life in the blaze.

The images of tankers flying through blinding smoke to drop water and fire retardant are incredible. One firefighter learned to fly helicopters shortly after graduating high school and is now the co-pilot of a massive Sikorsky CH-54A Skycrane stationed at the Mariposa Yosemite Airport. With a huge tank slung under its enormous rotors, the Sikorsky is continuously flying into dangerous situations.

The courage and dedication of the crews on the ground and in the air is extraordinary, including that of 19-year-old CH-54A co-pilot, Ann Hansen