Happy New Year!

As you may have noticed, we have no column from the president. Of course, this is because we have no president! I’d like to appeal to the members to seriously consider serving a term as club president. The club executive will support and assist anyone taking on the position. Personally, I’d be happy throw my hat in the ring, the position, but I’m already quite busy doing the newsletter…

I’m going to keep my comments short this month as I want to make space for Bashar Hussien’s excellent adventure article chronicling his winter trip across Canada. He comments in the article that they had lots of time to work with, little did he know that the first big storm of the year would hit just after his arrival in Indus!

This is the time of year that we all make resolutions committing to improving ourselves in the new year. I’m no different planning to become skinny (yeah, right!) and to do more work on the Buttercup construction this year than last. Fortunately, this one was very easy to achieve as I only logged 12 hours of work on her in 2013. I’ve already beat that in 2014!

Getting back in the shop has been a long time coming and I’m already making progress building the 12 wing mount fittings and prepping the spars to start wing assembly.

One thing I have spent some time on is putting together a plan of attack. For those of you that have built or are building kitplanes, you typically have some sort of builders manual that will guide you from one step to another. Granted, the quality of these manuals will vary from company to company. For those of us that choose to scratch build, manuals are a rare commodity. Some planes will have a brief description of the construction and others will have constructions printed on the plan sheets, but for most of them, we are left to our own devices.

For this reason, I’ve had to take a close look at the plans and use a little of my project management skills to put together a simple chart showing what tasks have to be done before other tasks can be started. For example, the rudder pedals and seats need to be positioned and finalized before finishing off the control column. I want to make sure the stick position is comfortable when I’m in a proper seating position. Also, all the flight controls need to be in place before building the fuel tanks so that everything will clear properly.

I did the same thing with the Christavia and found it very useful in making sure everything got done in the right order.

As for flying, this has not been a great fall, and the new year has not proven much better. Hopefully, we can get out of this cold snap and get some of that great winter flying weather we’ve become so use to over the past couple of winters.

Although I don’t plan on doing Oshkosh this summer, I’ve already had a buddy put the bug in my ear about doing a trip up north this summer, possibly to NWT, Yukon and Alaska. Although it has more power, his Citabria is well matched to my Christavia.

Here’s hoping for a bright new year and safe flying for everyone!