Chapter members have donated $800 to Marshall Co.'s Allen Fund to allow Brady Neuhalfen to continue his lessons there. This joins other money raised by pilots at Marshall Co. It's not too late for you to contribute to the Allen Fund.
As mentioned last month, our 2020 Ray Scholar has finished her private pilot program and is now at SIU's aviation school. So far, ours is 1 of only 7 chapters to have completed two Ray Scholar programs. Due to the pandemic, the program in general is well behind schedule this year, with only 35% completed so far. At the September chapter meeting, Rich Gilbert pointed out all the encouragement provided by Rob Meyer to the Ray Scholar this year.
Students in the aviation mechanics program at Lincoln Land Community College often also take work and training at the GE shop across the field, and GE tends to take the best ones on after they graduate. Nick Keith at Pekin hopes to offer similar work to LLCC students in a general aviation shop.
HQ has a new program called the Young Eagles Workshop. HQ has set up a package of material to allow chapters to make presentations on topics such as flight training and aviation weather as well as hands on work such as building a wing rib. Sporty's is subsidizing the cost of these training kits. If we're to pursue this, we'll need several volunteers. This will be brought up at future chapter meetings.
As we try to catch up with scenarios from Pilot Workshops missed during the pandemic lockdown, two were presented at the September VMC meeting. The second, and more interesting, was:
Seconds after rotation, the airplane has a mind of its own: It climbs; it descends; the controls seem all wrong. You get a moment of stability and have to decide what’s worse: Turning away from airlines approaching O’Hare—and risking renewed loss of control—or busting through the final approach of one of the world’s busiest Bravos.This was based on a real event, where the pilot missed that the ailerons had been rigged incorrectly, turning them into spoilers. This month's scenario, for Sunday in the hangar, is:
Flying a floatplane has inherent risks, one of which is your landing site might be impossible to use if the winds are wrong or the water is low. Amphibious gear gives you the best of both worlds—until it fails and leaves you searching for the least bad solution to a multi-headed problem.and we might try to pick up another missed episode at the same time.
The IMC Club meets the following Sunday in the hangar.
At the November 7th chapter meeting, the nominating committee will present for re-election the current board: Greg LePine (president), Bob Pegg (VP), Rob Meyer (treasurer), Karl Kleimenhagen (secretary), and Tim Coverstone, Ian Kempf, Todd Moore, Dan Talbott, and Ron Wright for the other 5 board positions.
The treasurer is working on a budget to be voted upon at the same meeting. A copy will be e-mailed to everyone when the meeting notice is sent out a few days before.
The September board meeting was held remotely, via e-mail, and the minutes can be found in the Members section of the web site. The board feels it unlikely we will hold the annual holiday banquet this year. They also have a plan to allow for the election of a new board and approval of a budget for 2021 should the pandemic leave us without a quorum at the November annual meeting.
HQ is soliciting large donations from life members to help balance this year's budget.
They'd also like to again call attention to their new Builder's Log, a site on which members can record the progress of their builds.
The chapter newsletter for October 1995 announced the chapter breakfast was to be held at Doc's Mt. Hawley Inn and the chapter meeting was to be at the Leisure Acres club house. It also reported on the chapter's annual picnic held in September. The slate of candidates for the upcoming chapter election was presented, and the location of the Christmas Luncheon was announced.
Former newsletter editor (and past chapter president) Morrie Caudill had digital copies of most of the newsletters from 1994 forward. With Morrie's help, these have been converted to reasonably compact PDF files and placed on the chapter web site. Also, the paper copies of old newsletters received from Morrie, Janet Snyder, and Bill Engel were inspected and cataloged. Most of these paper issues won't soon be copied to the web site, but in time (I need to get back to work on my RANS), one or two from every year will be transcribed for it.
A request to our older members: About 20 issues are missing from the chapter's archives, in the years 1990, 1992, and 2012. If you have a box of old newsletters in the basement or attic, please drop them off at the hangar.
Google hadn't indexed our site since it had moved to a new hosting service this spring. A request was put in for the new site to be "crawled," and this should result in these older newsletters being indexed.
Having gone through so many old newsletters titled with some variation of The Beacon, I've decided to again use this as the name of the newsletters. (I'll work on a better banner some other time.)
The September 1995 issue noted that the chapter had approved renting a hangar at 3MY to use as a chapter home, a goal reached the following summer. Morrie notes this effort was led by Sam Sisk, and at the annual meeting a motion will be made to place a plaque naming the hangar in Sam's honor.
David Petrakis, (309)696-6776, has two BD-5 aircraft kits from the late 1970s for sale. "I also have the complete plans and log books. Neither plane has been completed and are in crates." The lot is $3,000, and delivery is free if within 50 miles of Bartonville.
A few weeks ago, we received the sad news Steve Jones passed away from complications of treatment for lymphoma. He had been a chapter member for several years. On retiring from Caterpillar, he set about to build an RV-14A and finished it in good time, with his first flight last summer. He and Nancy, his wife of over 40 years, had moved to Arizona earlier this year. His full obituary can be found on the internet.
Ron Wright has finished his latest project and is ready to fly it but is awaiting paperwork.
The chapter suggested to the airport authority the new picnic tables could use a covered trash can, and one soon appeared.
That rumbling you heard in the air late last week was a flight of F-35 stopping at PIA.