Tracy

Looking forward to a week of total immersion in airplanes and engine talk, I arrived at Sun ‘n Fun with the usual sense of anticipation. The EAA had set aside an area for alternative engines but it was only big enough for three planes this year.

As Laura and I walked into the main display area after setting up camp I started to get an uneasy feeling that I could not explain. Several hours passed before I was able to identify what was causing it. Nothing was obviously wrong; there was the usual collection of vendor displays and airplanes. In fact, everything had a fresh, clean look to it. A new company had been contracted to handle on-site material moving and unloading and they went about their business with machine like precision and speed. New flower gardens and tasteful landscaping were everywhere. Buildings like the EAA merchandise store, which used to have a pretty good collection of cobwebs under the eaves, were now spotless. All in all the effect was something like…. Disney World. The trouble is, I don’t especially like Disney World. Not that there is anything wrong with clean & neat but the place seems to promise things that aren’t realistic. People come away from it wondering things like why don’t we have efficient monorail systems spanning the country to whisk us efficiently from place to place. They have no clue how much that half-mile ride on one just cost them.

This year was also the official opening of the new Sun ‘n Fun air museum. I had arrived 2 days before the official start of the fly-in and the shroud was still over the sign at the entrance, but I soon learned that the name underneath was ISAM, “International Sport Aviation Museum”. This didn’t help my uneasy feelings. There is a group within EAA, which is in favor of changing its name to SAA (Sport Aviation Association). I know all the arguments for doing this including improved public perception of homebuilding etc. but I am hopelessly attached to the romance surrounding the word “Experimental”. I probably won’t renew my membership if this change is ever made.

Even though everyone is not setup yet, it’s always nice walking the display area before the show starts. A peaceful calm prevails and only a handful of people are there instead of the throng of several hundred thousand which will soon descend on the place. We stopped briefly at Van’s Aircraft display to look at the RV-9. Haven’t started our RV-8 yet but we’re looking forward to it. The success of Van’s is a testimony to the wonderfully functional design of the RV series. There are currently over 2200 of them flying and an astounding 7000+ under construction.

The guys at Van’s were feeling a bit uneasy themselves. They had just been hit for $900 by Sun ‘n Fun’s new freight handling company just for off loading three containers from a truck. Ouch…

The first conversations overheard this year didn’t help my uneasy feeling either. It seems everyone was talking about how they had no time or inclination to build and they were all excited about the certified versions of the Cirrus and Lancair aircraft. By the end of the day I was feeling downright depressed. Was experimenting on its way out? Was the work I was doing

obsolete? I found myself feeling like some misguided Don Quixote tilting with windmills.

“The Good Old Days” is an expression I don’t think I have ever used, but I suddenly found myself looking fondly back at the days when I first got involved in flying. As most of you know, it was a gyrocopter that first introduced me to the joys of flight and the Sunstate Rotor Club became my aviation “Family”. The membership consisted of an unusual collection of aviation misfits who had only a few things in common. They had a pathological need to fly; they had little regard for conventional wisdom and, for the most part, lacked the financial resources to buy a “proper airplane”. A gyrocopter (we usually called them simply gyro or “machine” ) could be built for much less than even the lowest cost ultralight (this was back in the early 1970s, well before the advent of ultralights) and we raised the science of low cost gyro construction to a fine art.

Our once a month meetings were held at the business owned by Chuck Beaty. Chuck was one of the few members who could have afforded one of those “proper airplanes” but he was obsessed with the concept of cost effectiveness and I think it was Chuck who infected me with this same obsession. It was not unusual to arrive at a meeting (I usually got there at least an hour early) and find him underneath his aging Datsun 210, welding an empty freon tank in place of a muffler which had fallen off.

One reason we often arrived early was that Chuck’s business had a fully equipped machine shop, which was the birthplace of many of the gyros we flew. Looking back, I can’t believe the generosity and total disregard for personal liability he had. He would show us just enough about operating lathes and milling machines to avoid serious injury, then send us off, grinning like fools, to make metal chips.

The formal meeting (or as formal as we ever got) was run through as quickly as possible, then any last minute machining of parts was completed. At around ten O’clock most everyone would head for home leaving a hardcore group of around 7 of us who would then convene at the local Waffle House. It was here that we would get down to discussing the deadly serious business of solving the problems of low cost flying. We did this with all the passion and desperation that convicts might plan an escape from Alcatraze and it would usually be well after 2 AM before we went home.

Once in awhile a newcomer to the club would join in these late night sessions. More often than not they did not understand the group dynamic at work there and thought we were merely discussing aviation in general. If the subject of the night happened to be engines, they might bring up some article they had read in Popular Mechanics about a revolutionary new engine. Someone would politely say how interesting that was, then immediately return to our discussion. If it was not something we could lay our hands on and put on our flying machines, we had no real interest in it. If something was seriously discussed at one of these sessions, you could expect to see it turn up soon on somebody’s machine and the results would be poured over at the very next Waffle House summit. It was experimenters’ heaven.

With these thoughts running through my head, I looked around the manicured grounds and flawless airplanes at Sun ‘n Fun and it seemed very sterile and empty. The fun had been squeezed out of it and I felt myself longing for those earlier days for the first time in my life.

Fortunately, my mental funk did not last long, thanks to some of you readers. Shortly after making my way back out to the RVotter, several of you came by and I was once again surrounded by people for which experimentation and “real world solutions” to flying really mattered.

Real World Solutions, Inc

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