And So a New Flying Year Starts

Well, we seem to have gotten through another flying season and another year, with lots of events to attend. If you have an aircraft building or restoration project underway, hopefully you were satisfied with your progress this year. I’m certainly glad to have completed the rebuild of my RV-9A, and I will look forward to many flying adventures in 2015. I will enjoy meeting more of our readers this year and expect the opportunity to attend fly-ins instead of being up to my armpits in aircraft parts. As a newly minted board member of EAA’s Canadian Council, I will be more involved in chapter visits, too.

It may be a long shot, but if any of you out there are flying a DH.82 Tiger Moth, there was recently an emergency airworthiness directive sent out by the U.K. CAA as the Authority of State of Design. It relates to checking the strut tie rods, some of which were manufactured in Australia and have been found to be faulty – in one case causing a fatal crash.

It’s great to see Aircraft Spruce and Specialty offering custom harnesses. It recently began promoting its avionics harness service, and it offers its services to all aircraft owners including those who own homebuilt aircraft. Many homebuilders discover that avionics wiring has a steep learning curve, and making the same harness more than once can result in time and money wasted. You also need a lot of equipment before you begin forming your own harnesses, so in the long run, buying them might work out cheaper and save you lots of time.

I’d like to thank all of our contributors to the newsletter. Without you, there would be nothing. As the editor, I’m always on the lookout for new content, and we’ve had some really interesting articles this year. I hope you agree. Please consider writing something for your fellow readers, either as a complete article on your project or a tip or announcement about an event.

We submit all final content by the first of each month, so if you have thoughts of writing something, why not put a reminder in your calendar for the middle of the month (or the middle of every month)? Getting the content to me as plain text, with pictures attached but not embedded, works best. If you get it to me by about the 24th, it avoids a mad scramble to pull the newsletter together at deadline.

We managed to mention a little girl’s comments but didn’t notice that she was obscured by others in the photograph we published. So the photograph below is just for you, Kendra.

Check out the great webinar opportunities this month, and if you missed one, you will find it in the online archive. Maybe you’ll find it more convenient to view it in that format, anyway.

I’d like to wish all of you a happy and safe flying year, and as always, your feedback is highly valued.