"St Louis Flying Club Newsletter"

St. Louis Flying Club Newsletter - 24 June 2007

From The President - By Todd Michal

Dear Members,

The paint upgrade is currently underway. Charlie Royce stopped by Executive Wings on a business trip from Jackson to Memphis on June 18th and took some photos of the plane after partial stripping (see photos in club photogallery under Paint Upgrade). Shelby sent a status message on 21 June that is in the maintenance section below. It sounds like Shelby is doing a very thorough strip and prep effort which should give us a much longer paint life than before.

Happy Takeoffs!

Todd

Treasurer's Report - by Mike McBride

We had no flight hours this past month due to the repainting activity. This billing statement includes charges for the annual, for the GPS WAAS upgrade, and some stock charges for future annuals.

The current adjusted treasury is at just over $6,000, reflecting the April assessment for repainting. If the charges come in near the original estimate of $6,500, we should be able to cover the expenses from the current treasury and improvement fund, with no need for additional assessment. The WAAS upgrade charge has been covered via member credits, and we have only incidental additional charges pending for the GPS database subscription and new memory card. The insurance premium was paid in early June, and came in about $70 over the escrow estimate. Even with the increased estimates for insurance and GPS database, our monthly dues are holding steady at $75 per month. Share price is just over $8,900 per member, based on the May 2006 aircraft valuation.

Retail fuel prices at JetDirect increased slightly, putting our fuel rate at $4.40 per gallon; our flight rate remains at $58 per hour.

Mike

Aerobatic Flight/Training - by John

With our aircraft currently down for painting, there are other options for getting back into the air. John Housley, a co-worker of mine at Boeing started a business offering rides/training in a Pitts Special at Creve Coeur airport. The link to their site is Pitts Special Flight Experience. I went up with him for an hour a few months ago and it was a great experience. It was my first experience with aerobatics and it was great to see what it was like. We pulled about +5.4 g's and -2g's during the flight. He goes as slow or as fast as your stomach allows and I did not have any problem with that. After my flight, I have a much greater respect for the skill of aerobatic and airshow pilots.

Maintenance - by John

WAAS Upgrade - Mark updated our club GPS database subscription to include WAAS approaches. It was a little more expensive than the previous subscription rate and runs $364.79 a year.
We had two data cards for the GPS and they are no longer compatible with the upgraded GPS using WAAS. We kept one in the unit and the other would be available for programming the monthly database update. Garmin took one of our old cards and traded it in for the new model as part of the WAAS upgrade. We sold the other database card on Ebay and purchased a spare of the new type card from Garmin for $159.89.
There is a good presentation on WAAS that helps explain how it works, the various approach types that can be flown, and the many acronyms used.

Paint - The repainting effort is well underway. The prep effort for our last paint job was poorly done which probably caused the early paint peeling we saw. Shelby, the owner of Executive Wings, sent me the following status on 21 June:

June 21, 2007

John,

You guys got really hosed on the last job that was done. Of course, you already know that the flight controls had not been removed and we talked about that. Well, what the guy did was he stripped the fuselage, cabin top, top of the horizontal, and both sides of the vertical. He didn't strip the underside of anything. Instead, he featheredged the old paint into the bare metal and used an extremely heavy coat of primer surfacer to hide what he did. Next, he put a real heavy coat of paint over the heavy coat of primer and old paint. This resulted in a real thick layer of stuff to go down through. It looked really horrible.

Well, I'm happy to report that as of the end of business today the underside of the wings and horizontal are down to a mirror finish. In fact, the whole airplane is cleaned down with the exception of a couple of areas on the right wing and few other minor spots. To get down through all this took about twice as much paint remover as what normally takes for a 172. Underneath it all, though, is a really good looking airplane ! I've been in contact today with my tech support people at the chemical manufacturer to see if there's something else I can use to get the last two areas clean. They seem to think that whatever kind of paint it is there had some sort of teflon on it and they've got something that'll take it off. I'll know more tomorrow and this will let me know how to proceed. If all goes well, they'll have me something here in a few days. In the meantime, I already have the wheel pants, tips, etc. worked up and ready for primer so there's still lots of work to go on with it without costing me anymore time. If not, then I'm on my own ! I'll work it out though.

I'll try to get some photos to email to you by the week's end. I really appreciate everyone's patience and I'll do my best to get it done as soon as I can. I'm just really glad we're not doing this one in the middle of the winter !

Thanks again for your understanding.

Shelby

For more photographs, go to the Club Photo-gallery.

...