Category: Event

Builders:

Some more photos from Corvair College #37 in Chino California. This is our 17th year of Colleges, hundreds of people have attended them, learned a lot had fun and made friends. All types of people have found the Colleges the place they feel most at home in aviation. If you are yet to find your own place in aviation, Consider the Corvair movement, a place where the traditional EAA values of learn build and fly are still practiced at every event.

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Above, Daniel Kelley, Buttercup builder from Ventura CA, strikes the “Captain Morgan pose” right after his engine started. It took only 4 seconds of cranking to bring this 3,000 cc Corvair to life for the very first time.

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Randy Lewis flew in with his 2,700cc  Corvair powered Dragonfly. That is him standing by the cowl. Plane has been flying for a while, has about 100 hours on it and uses an Ellison EFS-3A carb.

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Photographic evidence that builders who attend Colleges actually read installation instructions.

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The very petite Kiku Williams hard at work on her 2,700 cc Corvair. Most of are stands and fixtures work for people between 5’6″ and 6’6″. No problem, Kiku just pulled up a step stool and went to work assembling the bottom end in  her hello kitty shirt. Engine is destined for her KR-2s.

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1964 Corvair Greenbrier daily driver showed up on Sunday.

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Edward Wang pulls the prop through with the oil system is primed on his 3,000 cc engine. It is destined for his Zenith 750 cruiser. He built the engine staring from a closed case in 2 days at the College. This was his first event.
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Builders:

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Above, Daniel Kelley’s 3,000 cc engine set for an early am test run. It is destined for his Buttercup project.

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Dan Weseman leading a discussion on closing a case.

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Blue 2,700 engine is for Steve Glovers own personal KR-2s.

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A number of 3,000 cc Bottom ends going together with Weseman gen II 5th bearings.

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Above core looked terrible on outside, but was clean on the inside, and has a set of forged pistons inside.

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Noted Land Based Corvair expert Bob Helt’s dog Rocky

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Builders:

We had a full day of prep for the college, which officially kicks off at noon tomorrow. A number of people have been assisting Steve Glover with prep work. Well Known KR pilot Richard Shirley was at the shop three days in a row, and his home is all the way on the other side of the LA basin. Today we were Joined by Dan Branstrom, who drove in from his home near Palm Springs. Dan has been around Corvairs for a long time, You can see pictures of him at Colleges as far back as CC #5 in Hanford CA in 2004.

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Two men with some common ties: Dan Branstrom on the left and Steve Glover on the right. Both of them served as Marines, Dan in the 1960s and Steve in the 1990s.  Steve’s first experimental aircraft was a Jeanie’s Teeny. He got started building it as an enlisted man in the barracks. Dan was actually on hand to see the designer Calvin Parker make the maiden flight in 1967.  These are the kinds of connections builders discover at Colleges. The events are far more than engine building seminars.

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Builders,

Yesterday, Dan Weseman and myself flew out commercial from Jacksonville to Los Angles, to get ready for Corvair College #37 in Chino This weekend. It was a long day on a few hours of sleep, the photo below taken By Dan’s sister who lives out here. She took us to dinner at a place near LAX called “flights” which serves your beer samples on wing ribs.

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Above, a picture taken by Dan’s sister last night. He claims to pay no attention to ‘social media’ so I guess he will not notice that he was practicing his ‘happy face’ in this picture.

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Dan and Rachel’s two youngest boys are normally very respectful, and are trained to refer to adults “Mr.” or “Mrs.” in front of your first name, but when the boys are speaking to each other, my code name is “Old Hairy Guy, ”  as in “you’re going to have to sit next to old hairy guy on the drive to the airport” If you need someone to gently break the news to you that you have arrived at middle age, don’t ask a 10 year old, they are too honest.

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Because Dan flies a Chevy and drives a ’96 Silverado, some people think he must be on the Chevy side of the Ford vs Chevy civil war, but he is not. In Reality he is a 100% Ford guy. He has owned an endless unbroken chain of Mustangs his whole adult life, Rachel’s daily driver is an Expedition, and even their motorhome is equipped with a V-10 modular Ford engine. Getting Dan to fly a Chevy was a tough sell emotionally, so you know it must make a lot of sense logically. For the record, I gave Dan the Silverado a couple of years ago, a beater that another friend at our airport gave to me. I say this just so Dan’s record for team Ford is clean: He has never bought a Chevy to drive, even though he is OK with flying them.

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Above, Eric Overton at Corvair College #36 in Texas, stands with his 95% complete 2,775 cc Corvair. The engine is destined to power Eric’s Neuport 12,  a two seat WWI replica.  I am not sure how the nickname started, but Eric is self-confident enough that he actually likes and uses it.  We kid around that when his plane is done we are going to get him in a French officer’s uniform in front of it,  photo shop it in Sepia tone to make it look 100 years old, an label it  “Air Marshall Bidet and his personal Neuport”

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There is a serious side to all this: Eric has beaten Cancer three times in his adult life, fought the last battle just this year. We are not speaking of minor conflicts, we are speaking of the kind where your doctor tells you to get your affairs in order. What kind of guy keeps chipping away at a long term aircraft project when he is being advised that buying green bananas is too optimistic? A guy who is determined not to lose.

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Eric has been to every College we have held in Texas. He is an interesting cat with a lot of life experience. He is a Dartmouth graduate electrical engineer who works on rapidly developed electronic devices for industry.  He brought some of this stuff to #22, the first Texas college. Everyone expected that a guy with that background would drive something like a Tesla Motors car. Instead he drove in with his early 1960’s Ford Falcon.  Eric explained that America is addicted to high tech electronics, and his career is supplying the cutting edge of that need.  Then he added “like any successful drug dealer, I don’t use the product I push.”

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Think you have to have something in common with me to get along?  Guess again. I am a grease monkey, and Eric is a comparative rocket scientist. In five years, this is what I have found that Eric and I have in common: We like planes. Evidently that is enough, because we get along great.

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Think you may be too different to fit in with people at Corvair Colleges?  Maybe your friends have an even weirder nick name for you than “Air Marshall Bidet”? I didn’t think so. We have enough characters that you will be in little danger of sticking out.

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Think you will always have ‘next year’ to advance your dreams?  Maybe, but Eric could probably make a strong argument for not putting life off.  He would also tell you that succumbing to the negative little voice that says you can’t, you shouldn’t and dreams like that are not for guys like you is giving up, and there is nothing to be achieved by giving up, even when the odds are very long.

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Builders:

I have taken a break from the western Corvair College tour to fly back to Florida, and spend a solid week in the hangar making more parts and components. I spent the last week in Chino California working with Corvair College #37 host Steve Glover, and almost all of the prep for #37, which starts on the 22nd, is in place.  On the 20th, two days before #37, Dan Weseman and I are flying out to California, and we will do all the tech support and teaching at the Chino college.

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I flew back from LAX to Jacksonville, by way of Atlanta today. The send leg to Jacksonville was Delta flight 774, an MD-90 aircraft. I was seated near the very back of the plane, in row 34. About 5 minutes into the flight, while the plane was still climbing hard, we entered a cloud layer, and several times in the space of 60 seconds you could feel the plane gently porpoise in pitch. It was enough to make my sweat shirt float for a second or so. The passengers didn’t notice, but anyone who was a pilot would have known something was going on. The pilot stopped climbing, and in a clam voice announced that we had a trim failure, and we were returning to the airport.

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People groaned, because they are fools who understand nothing about command decisions on safety. The first thought on my mind was that this plane, an MD-90, had a nearly identical trim system as the MD-83 that was Alaskan Airlines 261 crash in 2000. That plane stayed airborne for 10 minutes before plunging into the Pacific Ocean.

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If you saw the movie “Flight” a few years ago, you saw Denzel Washington’s character try to fly an airliner inverted. The movie was fiction, but it had some roots in reality; The black boxes from Alaskan 261 showed that as a last ditch chance to survive, the flight crew actually tried flying their MD-83 inverted. It didn’t work, and everyone on the plane perished.

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The Delta crew did an excellent job of calmly bringing the flight back to Atlanta. We were greeted by a full compliment of fire trucks and rescue vehicles. We taxied back to the gate and everyone was loaded onto a different MD-90. This is the only airline flight I have ever been on in my life that was terminated after take off for a mechanical failure. We got to Jacksonville 2 hours late, but with the same flight crew. I spoke to the pilot for a moment and he said the failure was likely an elevator trim motor. I complimented him on his judgment, smooth flying, and his clam voice on all the announcements. He smiled, but shrugged it off.

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An aviator of ethics and principles, John J. Liotine:

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John Liotine was a very experienced aircraft mechanic who worked for Alaskan Airways. He went to the FAA and reported that Alaskan was filing fictitious maintenance records. The FAA investigation confirmed this. 3 years before the Flight 261 crash, Liotine recommended replacing the very jack screw that failed, but Alaskan did not. After the crash  investigation showed that Liotine was right, and the Airlines claims about his character were slander, he was awarded $500,000 in damages.  People who debate the power of corporations to elude justice should consider this: No criminal charges were ever filed against anyone in the ownership or management of Alaskan Airlines.

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Builders,

I have been to many airports, but I can’t think of one with more cool planes on the ramp than Chino California, the site of our next Corvair College. If you ever have the chance to visit, and you really love planes, make the trip.

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Yes, that is a privately owned, flying Saab 35 Draken, a famous cold war interceptor from Sweden. It isn’t every airport that has a Mach 2.2 bird with a 35,000’/min. rate of climb just sitting out at a tie down. There are actually a half dozen Drakens here, but this was the nicest one. Evidently at least one particularly wealthy individual in Southern California has an interesting take on expending capital.

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