Crawled out of bed this morning, and we proceeded in the Museum to meet up with Zach (this is a view from the top of the stairs looking at the original AirCam and the t-shirt sales!). I’m not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination (my systems don’t really come online until mid-afternoon), but somehow, I’m able to get my rear in gear when there’s planes involved.
Even when I worked at an airport in college, I started work at 5:30 in the morning…never a problem! This meant I got up at 3:45 and hit the road by 4:30 am. I would cruise along deserted roads at 95-100 mph, listening to Art Bell interview UFO abductees or Dr. Hoagland talking about finding faces on Mars (ah, middle of the night AM talk radio), just so I could walk around the hangars checking the Hobbs meters and then pull the planes onto the tarmac.
There were several volunteers at the tent (and Zach’s intern, a girl totally bored by aircraft), and no interviews yet. I listened to one of the Warbird’s…Warbirds are the former military aircraft brought to Oshkosh by private collectors…people talk about the difficulties of doing restoration work. Not on his aircraft, but his tug, a vehicle which tows airplanes around on the ground. He’s restoring a Ford-Ferguson tug used at the famous Willow Run factory. This was a factory created by Henry Ford to build aircraft on an assembly line much as he made cars. Raw materials entered the massive Willow Run facility on one end, and four-engined B-24 Liberator bombers rolled off on the other end.
It was interesting hearing him talk about some of the little historical details which had turned up. For example, the tugs had toolboxes with sloped lids. It turned out that this was specific to tugs used at this plant. Someone noticed that people set tools down on the flat lids, and then drove off and lost them. Solution: angle the lid so they couldn’t set tools down without them falling off!
We tried to get him to do an interview…the guy has P-51 Mustang and a jillion hours flying all sorts of aircraft (not sure what he does, but he clearly has some serious coinage in the bank).
At around 10:30, I left to go to a technical session on a new electric-powered aircraft from China.
The Yuneec (Unique) E430 a product of a factory in Shanghai, with a little technical assistance on the fuselage and wings from a manufacturer of competitive soaring gliders in Germany. In just the past few months, they’ve created a two-seat motorglider…an aircraft which uses power to take off and at certain times during flight, but operates as a glider during the rest of the flight. With good conditions, you could stay aloft all day, but practically, flights are about 2-3 hours tops (which is pretty decent!). This is just a prototype, but they are working to certify this plane in Europe, and possibly offer it here in the US as an experimental aircraft.
The plane would be the first-ever commercially-produced electric aircraft. And, at $89,000, relatively affordable. Wingspan is 45′, so you might want to get a big garage…but the plane only weighs 392 pounds without batteries. The batteries add only about 170 pounds more. They’re a lithium polymer compound with high energy density, and a recharge time of only three hours! Very cool. They’re planning on offering the powerplant to people in the US who want to design their own aircraft around it.
Hmm…I’ve got about 15 designs in mind already! More to come shortly…