Another Great Month of Flying!

September 2017 - What a blast we had flying this month and tinkering with the aircraft. I hope many of you feel the same way. As I write this, we are just seeing the first tinges of fall colours, and I saw my first flight of honkers passing over my neighbourhood today. Let’s hope the fall brings some super flying weather with it before the sn … the sn … it’s no good. I can’t say it just yet.

If you are reading this, it means that we have the right e-mail address for you, but folks change e-mail addresses and sometimes forget to update with EAA. If any of your friends have stopped receiving Bits and Pieces, please have them check their e-mail addresses on the subscription page. It’s preferable for readers to have a subscription themselves rather than for folks to have to worry about forwarding the newsletter, and everyone will get it sooner. We try to use this as a primary vehicle for getting news to you about our EAA activities across the country.

Anyone can subscribe by clicking on this link (that may be a reason to forward this to them, but just this once, eh?). You do not need to be a current EAA member but do need to create an account. By the way, we get lots of useful information about which articles you liked by counting how many of you clicked on which articles. Don’t worry, we just count the clicks; we don’t identify the people. But it is useful to see what you like, so we can try to give you more of it.

Thanks to Harrie Jones, a first time contributor to Bits and Pieces, for his excellent article on being intercepted by a C-130 Hercules. I’m sure you will all agree that we’d like to read more of his writing talent.

Our High River, Alberta-based, two-day SportAir Workshops are coming up in early October, on the 7th and 8th to be precise. If you’ve thought about building your own aircraft, these courses are always very well-supported with expert instructors to teach you how to build and test your own flying masterpiece. Pilots also come to Canada from the United States to attend. If you’d like to reserve a spot in one of these classes, contact Jack Dueck.

You’ll read elsewhere in this newsletter about our trip to Prince Edward Island (PEI) at the end of August. I invited several of those pilots who flew to subscribe to our newsletter. I’d like to welcome those of you who did subscribe. We had a great time in PEI, and it was a real delight meeting you.

I am installing a new autopilot in my RV-9A. I’ll provide a separate article next month. It was surprisingly easy, if a tad time-consuming, to install. Most of the work was spent figuring out where to route wires, and where to connect them. A new stick grip had to be installed to allow for an autopilot-disconnect button on the stick. It turns out that my Dynon D10A can talk directly to the Dynon autopilot servos, and that the autopilot functionality is automatically turned on once the initial calibration has been completed, so a separate autopilot controller was unnecessary. I’ll have a pitch/roll autopilot for less than CA$2,000, which will make those long cross-country flights a bit easier.

Here are a couple of photos I thought you might like. Someone drew a Pac-Man in the skies over EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2017.

I thought you’d like this shot of the Paradigm paraglider team during their show at Oshkosh.