Colleges #34 and #35 updates; a Plan for Progress

Builders:

We are getting in high gear for the upcoming College #34. If you are one of the 70 builders signed up, we will shortly be sending out the detailed instructions to your email on getting the most out of the College. If you have been to a college before, they will be familiar, with a few new details. If this is your first college, please take the time to read them in detail, it will make a large difference in what you will learn and accomplish.

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If you are thinking about heading to CC#35 at Barnwell, you are down to the wire on the sign up. There are just a few seats left. Sign up is here: Corvair College #35, Barnwell SC, only 20 seats left . (the title is from a week ago, there are just a few seats now.) If you would like a visual look at what a Barnwell College looks like, check out this video that the EAA made: New EAA video on Corvair College#27, Barnwell 2013.

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This week has been very busy with College prep. The day before we leave is busy, but the peak pressure is actually about 10-14 days out, because there are several deadlines like tomorrow being the last day we can get things into the powder coater. There are similar deadlines for each of our machine shops. Besides this, the phone has rung off the hook and we have had a good backlog of email to deal with. If you have called but had an issue getting the machine, it is because I am on the other line. If you need to contact us, send an email with your phone number and the latest hour I can call you back. In a few days I will be able to cover these, we generally try to call every person headed to the college to touch base before we leave. As Grace is out of town this week taking care of her parents, we are trying to coordinate contacts over email and the phone, please be patient, we will gladly cover your questions.

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A Few words about sticking to your own “Plan for Progress”:

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Above, a photo from CC#30 in Mexico one year ago. On the right, Dick Navratil…… I glanced at the EAA video mentioned above to make sure the link worked. If you look at the 1:10 mark on it, you will see a short interview with Dick……If you didn’t know him, and didn’t immediately make the connection, he is the man in this story I wrote from June: Dick Navratil Passes from this earth, June 4th, 2015.

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I knew Dick a long time, and I would like to say I am sorry at his passing, but anyone who knew him can tell you he got nearly everything a man could out of homebuilding. He was 66, and that is not long enough. We don’t have ultimate control over how long we have, but Dick’s life remains a lesson that you do control how much you get out of every week, and what your attitude is about events. To Dick, life was a challenge and an adventure to be shared with friends. He built and flew seven or eight home builts, had countless hours aloft, and friends near and far. He started every new flying season in his life with a Plan for Progress.

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This last week saw a public shift in some of my suggestions for sources, and a little bit of the drama club stuff as a reaction to this change. The new sources will allow builders to fine tune their own Plan for Progress, and part of it is geared to give me more hours in the shop, to work with builders. These are good things, but there are people stuck on internet debates and entertainment which should have no effect on their plan, but it does.

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There were things in homebuilding that Dick cared about greatly. When he no longer felt up for publicly advocating them, he often spoke to me and asked that I keep themes he cared about in the forefront of discussions, particularly in the world of Pietenpols. But none of that ever stopped Dick from making progress on all the planes he finished and flew. He was neither optimistic nor pessimistic, he was simply determined. This is a perspective worthy of emulation.

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In the next few weeks over 160 builders will head to a Corvair College. The will learn and make progress meet friends, have an outstanding experience. Others at home will make solid progress, getting closer to running and flying one day at a time. But there will also be another group who get distracted from keeping their own plan for progress. These people don’t have much positive inertia on their project because they stop and wait to see how every promised distraction turns out. They feel like they are planning but if Dick were here to say it, he would tell them they are only waiting and wasting time, hours that none of us have a guarantee on. Dicks success in homebuilding came from planning and progress, and not being dissuaded. If you will or will not complete and fly your plane is primarily determined by your decision tonight: will you make a plan and progress or will you wait and see?

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-ww.

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Many people want to believe that some new product in aviation will arrive and ‘revolutionize’ everything. I think the root of this fantasy is that they would like the work and learning to be removed and save them the effort required to stand in front of a machine and say “I built this plane.” I have been in aviation for 25 years, I have seen 25 seasons of ‘revolutionary!’ things come and go with little or no affect on accessibility to flight for working Americans.

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I have watched many of the same people get taken in by a new ‘revolutionary!’ idea every few years, never seeing that they would have been long flying if they had just given up on ‘new revolutionary!’ products with lottery ticket odds of success, and instead embraced the philosophy of proven designs with a track record in place of a promise. They will be waiting there in another 10 years because that bus isn’t ever going to come. The rainbow bus line from Unicorntown doesn’t have a stop on reality street, it only is headed to cyberville, and there is no airport in cyberville.

Read the whole story here: Waiting for the bus from Unicorntown to Cyberville