Tailcone Attach

As mentioned in an earlier post, we are reordering events slightly here and performing Section 32 (Tailcone Attach) prior to Section 31 (Upper Forward Fuse).

So tonight we had one of those few moments that really didn't take too much work but really had a tremendously rewarding payoff. It's amazing how seeing what the airplane looks like from firewall to tail can really light a fire under you!

Started Section 32 with a relatively naive mind, in the sense that I hadn't really done much read-ahead in this section and I just planned to perform each step as it is called out. The section starts with the F-1006B Bulkhead, final-drilling and dimpling a number of holes (not sure why this couldn't just have been done in the tailcone section for the empennage, but whatevs), and then transferring the bulkhead over to the fuselage and clecoing it to the baggage floor ribs. The very next step is pretty cool: cleco the tailcone to the fuselage.

Tailcone clecoed to fuselage, R side

Tailcone clecoed to fuselage, L side

There are a LOT of rivets from front to back!

F-1074 Tailcone Forward Top Skin clecoed into position

Holy mackerel, this airplane is big!

I'd like to point out that Sarah and I have seen dozens upon dozens of RV-10's before, but always in their "natural environment" like a hangar or ramp somewhere, or of course Oshkosh. We're also intimately familiar with the size and shape of both the fuselage section and the tailcone section from building one of each. Furthermore, we've had those two pieces laying on benches next to each other for the past couple days now and could easily picture them mated together. Even so, none of that actually prepared us for the emotion that was felt when we took a step back to admire the two sections actually clamped together, temporarily forming a complete fuselage from firewall to tail!

To be honest, the fuselage section always looked a bit small to me as we were building it. I'm aware of how much room there actually is in a complete RV-10 since we've sat (and flown) in a few of them, but for whatever reason the fuselage up until this point has always appeared kind of small to us. Now all of a sudden with the tailcone attached this airplane looks HUGE! We spent a good 30 minutes just staring at the fuselage and marveling about how this is going to be the machine that takes us (and plenty of our stuff) all over the place in just a couple more years. It's times like this that make up for all the tedious and sometimes boring work that you can drone on with for sometimes weeks at a time.

Anyway, once the shock had worn off and the drool was wiped from our mouths, we finished up the build session by match-drilling the four holes per side between the mid fuse and aft longerons, and installed bolts to hold things in place. Two little shims were fabricated out of 0.025" scrap (about 3/4" x 2" in size) to tuck between the top skin and the mid fuse longeron. Next step is to match-drill the side skins to the longerons, but that's enough for tonight... more to come soon!

Fuse Side Skins - Steps - Section 29/30 Complete!

Let me start off by saying I'm just oh-so-happy to be done with Section 29... it was one of the less-fun and time-consuming chapters of this build so far. It contained 22 pages of tasks, many of which required fabricating special tools and/or forming giant (and expensive) pieces of aluminum angle or aluminum sheet. On top of that, there were a gazillion holes that needed to be drilled, deburred, countersunk, and/or dimpled. But enough of me complaining, really it was actually quite rewarding work, even if a lot of it was a PITA.

Started off this morning installing the couple hundred or so blind rivets that hold the forward floor panels into their permanent locations. This then allowed for the next step of installing the landing gear mounts:

The landing gear mounts after final installation

Close-up of L landing gear mount

A note about installing these: It takes waay longer than I thought it would to get all the bolts, washers, and nuts into place and torqued properly. I thought "eh, it's just a handfult of bolts, how hard can it be?" Trust me, it takes time. One of the more interesting parts of this is figuring out how to get the washers onto the bolts along the bottom row... the gap between the center section bulkheads is way too narrow to get your hand inside, so I used a super-long set of needle nose pliers to carefully hold the washer and put it over the bolt threads. I also used a magnetic pickup tool to grab the washers any time they got accidentally dropped, which inevitably happened a few times. In the end, patience prevailed and they are all in!

With the gear mounts installed, I put and end to Section 29 in about 5 more minutes, after riveting the F-1088-L/R fuselage ribs into place now that the floors are done. Whew!

Turning the page to Section 30 now, I picked up where I left off with the steps. The baggage floor needs to be half-installed with clecoes to hold proper alignment, and then the plastic blocks need to be match-drilled to the baggage ribs. There isn't a whole lot of room here to do all that:

The L step, with baggage floor peeled up and clamped to the upper back seat brace to gain access

In the photo above, you have to drill sideways through the plastic block on the right. So, I got out the right angle attachments and #12 bit and put together this contraption:

Right-angle drill for step mount

I made two holes on each side using this technique, and then removed everything else to gain easy access and make the final two holes. It really wasn't all that bad, and only took maybe 10 minutes. After that, the steps were re-inserted and "clocked" to the right position, which should be 45-1/4" back from the aft edge of the center section bulkhead:

Clocking the steps (measuring tape is clipped over a piece of scrap angle iron that is clamped to and coming down off the aft side of the center section bulkhead)

A couple match-drills later, holy crap we're done! I think the whole section took maybe an hour... wow! When compared to the last section, it feels pretty good! Of course, I'll still need to prime/paint/powdercoat the steps, but that will be sometime in the future.

Other than that, it's time to move on to a new section. I'm going to skip Section 31 for now (upper forward fuse/inst panel) and instead begin with Section 32 -Tailcone Attach. The main reasons for this are that I want to finish a few loose ends on the tailcone (battery tray, ELT mount, magnetic sensor mount) finished up, get them joined, and then install the casters I have to make the fuselage a "temporary taildragger" of sorts. I think that will free up the most room in the shop, and also will put us in a good position to finish up the rest of the fuselage.

So, Sarah and I went up to the front of the garage and brought the tailcone down from its resting spot on the ceiling. It was cool to set it behind the rest of the fuselage and see how it will all fit together! Sorry, no pics of that yet (it was dusty, haha). I did, however, get a jump start on fabricating the battery tray. I have an idea that I will be exploring on that front... another day!

Fuse Side Skins - Steps

Getting ever closer to finishing Section 29! Had the day off from work yesterday for my birthday (woo!) but didn't really work on the plane itself; instead I just cleaned up and organized around the shop a bit. Today, though, it's on. I started by finishing the rear air vents that Sarah had started the other day:

The L/R Rear Vent assemblies

Pretty straightforward part of the plans, just some match-drilling, deburring, and edge-finishing. I used a dremel with a small bit to smooth the inside groove of the track, shown here:

Smoothing (and slightly enlarging) the groove to smoothly fit the shaft of a AN525-10R7 screw, shown to the left.

After a quick shot of primer, they got riveted together and then put into place in the side skins, and that checks one more thing off the list that needs to be done for this chapter! Looking ahead, I needed to wait for Sarah to get home later so we could finish that one last forward fuse channel before continuing with the forward floors. So, why not skip ahead and start on mounting the steps in Section 30? I hear it's a pretty easy section, especially after the arduous and infamous Section 29. So, I grabbed the two plastic blocks used to secure the end of the step mounts and marked as shown in the plans with a silver sharpie:

Marked 3/8" from each side in the four corners for drilling

Drilled the two blocks #10 at each of the four corners

Next step was to deburr the steps themselves. I used the scotch brite wheel quite liberally around where the welds are to try and clean them up a bit... they were fairly rough-looking. A test-fit into the fuselage seemed to work well going through the main steel support bracket and into the newly-drilled plastic mounting blocks. The next thing to do is match-drill the four holes from the blocks into the baggage floor ribs, but I'll save that for later. Sarah got back home at this point and we went right into riveting the R lower forward fuse channel. This completes all the rivets for the forward side skins!

Now that the skin riveting is done, the next step will be to install the forward floor covers. This part has me a bit anxious, because the design of the RV10 is such that the forward floor covers are a permanent part of the structure-- they have to go in underneath the landing gear mounts and will basically "never" come back off again without some major work. Combined with that, there is a lot of discussion (almost as much as there is for different kinds of primers) about insulation: which one is best for soundproofing, thermal insulation, fire retardant, etc etc. You can spend months researching all this stuff and still not be happy with your decision, I believe. The biggest concern, of course, is using insulation that will not readily burn, and will not release loads of toxic smoke when exposed to flame.  I've read through all the forums, and had some good conversations at OSH with a number of builders who are very well versed on this topic, and I believe I have made an informed decision. Here's what I ended up doing.

A month or so ago I purchased a 120ft roll of 1/8" x 24" FiberFrax felt, which is a 2000deg ceramic insulation blanket and is commonly used on firewalls and other high-temperature fire-prone areas. I will be using a layer of this against the bottom skin, topped by some household-type acoustic/thermal insulation. The stuff is actually made out of recycled denim, which at first seemed a bit odd and made me a bit hesitant to use it but the more I read about it and the more I tested it (see below) the more I decided this was the right stuff for me. I also recently watched this video on the burn characteristics of different kinds of insulation:

After watching this video (although they didn't test the denim insulation in question) it kind of shot down my thoughts of using fiberglass insulation... it just melts away into a big hole! I wondered what the denim stuff would do, and I was quite happy with the results. I performed a similar test to what the guy did in the video above at 2:20.

Click here to watch the video

Mapp torch/penny burn test for UltraTouch Denim Insulation

As you can see, the insulation does carry a small flame for a few seconds after the torch is removed (slightly worse than the cellulose in the video above), but more importantly there is very little fume and it forms the same kind of char that helps to block the fire from spreading as quickly. Plus, this was at penny-melting temperatures when exposed to a direct torch flame... by the time this were to happen in the airplane it would have already burned through the firewall and a layer of fiberfrax. I hate to imagine that kind of scenario, but hey, anything is possible and you have to plan for it in your design. So, the insulation got cut and laid into place:

Layers of Fiberfrax (right) topped with UltraTouch acoustic/thermal insulation (left)

Once the insulation was laid up, I said one last goodbye to the forward floor area and clecoed the floor panels into place! That's it for tonight, first thing tomorrow I'll rivet these floor panels down and continue with finishing Section 29!

Tunnel Access Cover

Short night in the factory today. Sarah had to run some errands and things to do in the house so I just started on my todo list of things that need to be worked on that I could do solo. First up was to finish the tunnel access cover!

The basic idea was to scratch-build a cover similar to those available by 3rd party vendors such as Airward. A while back, I had made the 7" x 11" cutout in the R forward fuse rib, and rough-cut the doubler plate that fits behind it. I didn't have any 0.040" aluminum sheet handy at the time, so I couldn't make the cover itself (I had made the doubler out of thicker 0.050"). I shelved the mini-project until now, since I do have the necessary parts to continue.

First step was to trace out and cut a piece of 0.040" sheet to make the cover itself. After deburring, a quick test-fit seemed to look good and I was then able to lay it on top of the doubler plate (which had not yet been cut out in the middle) and start match-drilling 20x #40 holes between the cover and the doubler. I did this by drawing reference lines 1/4" from the edge of the cover on all 4 sides, and marking the 4 intersecting points with a center punch. I drilled those 4 corner holes #40 and then used a rivet spacer fan to mark the remaining holes, then drilled them out as well. Once all 20 holes had been drilled, I took the cover and final-drilled those holes to #27 (for #6 screw) and then dimpled the holes.

The tunnel access cover after drilling & dimpling

Next, the doubler had to be drilled for nutplates. I clecoed a #6 nutplate to the holes that were match-drilled in the previous steps, and then match-drilled the nutplate on to the doubler in all 20 locations. After all this was done, I could now enlarge the #40 screw holes to their final #27 size, and then countersink everything using #40 and #27 countersinks and the microstop. Once all the countersinking was done, I drew lines around the inside perimeter of where the cutout should be, drilled 1/4" holes at the corners (to radius the corners) and cut the rest out using a jigsaw. After a bit of cleanup with the file, I had this piece:

The tunnel access doubler

Both pieces as they will fit into the tunnel

Looks good! In hindsight, I'm not sure if this was worth all the extra trouble over just buying the darn kit for $60. There's probably about $20 of raw materials here if you count rivets, screws, nutplates, and sheet metal; plus several hours of labor fabricating everything. The quote "There are two kinds of people in this world: People who spend their time saving money, and people who spend their money saving time" came to mind with this. Also, I think 20 screws holding this cover on is probably a bit of overkill, since the airward kit comes with like 12 I think. Either way, it's done now and it's gonna work great!

Hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to finish up the rivets on the bottom parts of the skins and be one step closer to putting an end to section 29!

Fuse Side Skins

Sarah and I took a short flight up to KVTI today with our friend Derek to attend a fly-in grill-out cosponsored by our friends at Walter Aviation. It was a great evening of seeing old friends, ramp-wandering, recounting OSH15 stories, and of course munching on some delicious food, including as I was told "all the cake you want". That is a dangerous combination of words. It was delicious, but keeping in mind our weight and balance limitations for the the three of us in the Warrior we flew up in, I only ate one piece. I swear.

On the flight back to Marion, we decided to call up KCID approach and poke into the Class C airspace to take some photos of downtown and fly over the Cedar Rapids Kernels game that a number of our friends were attending for a work event. Keeping FAR 91.119 in mind concerning flight over congested areas, I didn't make quite as low of a pass as I might have wanted to. However, I did rock my wings to say hello, and although there would have been no way to see it for sure I hear that it was reciprocated by a wave or two from the ground. :-)

Derek took this really cool photo of downtown!

Passing over the Kernels game ~1500'AGL

Downtown Cedar Rapids, flying over the Cedar River

Anyway, once we got back home it was time to get back to work for a relatively short build session. Derek stopped by too, and although we didn't have much for him to work on this time, he got to experience firsthand the Mike & Sarah Show, using our headsets to communicate with each other through the firewall and side skins. He took a few pics to chronicle the process:

Setting the floor rib-to-firewall 4-4 flush rivets. This probably could/should have been done earlier, but for sure needs to be done before installing the forward floor covers.

Riveting the bottom of the forward side skin to the floor channel

Sarah poised on the inside of the fuselage with the bucking bar

We tried to keep the mood light :-)

I think we only got through maybe 20 or so rivets tonight, but they were a pretty difficult set of 20 and it was a pretty late start given the events earlier in the evening. We'll finish the rest of them tomorrow or whenever we can both get some time to get back to it. Until next time, that's it for now!

Fuse Side Skins

The end of Section 29 is getting so close I can smell it! Although, I'm not sure if we're really actually that close, or if it's just a really strong smell :-)

Continued today with riveting the side skins, and by this point I believe about 95% of all rivets in this section have been set... yay! I think we'll need one more partner session to do the R lower fuse channel and the aft bottom edges, and we should be all done with riveting through section 29-18. After that, it looks like all that's left to do is install the rear seat vents, the fwd cabin floor, the landing gear mounts, and then one last lil' rib (F-1088-L/R) that has been left out for now to keep open access to the forward floor areas.

State of current affairs:

R side skins all riveted into place, minus aft bottom edge and lower fwd section

Main area of concentration for R side skins

R side forward fuse area

Exciting times! Looking ahead in the plans, this appears to be the last "marathon" section for a little while, looking forward to some page-turning hopefully in the near future!

Fuse Side Skins

The riveting of the side skins continues through today! Not only are there a metric crap-ton of rivets in this section, but many of these rivets are extremely difficult to reach from the inside. I did as many as I could by myself before recruiting Sarah for the task of climbing into the airplane and bucking the ones I absolutely could not reach myself. Laying down flat on her stomach over the front seat area and riveting the lower fwd fuselage channels, we realized hearing protection was not optional here. We had the idea to grab our David Clark headsets and a portable intercom system I had so we could have hearing protection and talk to each other. It's nerdy as hell, but it worked amazingly!

Sarah's workstation inside the plane (right) and my workstation under the front side of the plane (left), connected by headsets and an intercom!

It was pretty hot today (got up into the 90's) and even with two fans going full-blast we took a number of breaks to cool off, rehydrate and stretch out. By the time we called it a night though, we had basically finished riveting the left side of the fuselage! The right side still needs to be done, except for the rivets we had done yesterday around the center section bulkhead. That's a task for another day!

Fuse Side Skins

There are a few countersinks that still need to be made on the sides of the fuselage structure, particularly around the center section bulkheads where the wing attach bolts go. In order to gain access to these areas, the bolts holding the two center sections together must be removed, and this makes me a bit nervous to remove them all at the same time (I'm trying to minimize the number of times I tighten and loosen these bolts, since they are a close-fit tolerance and I don't want to wear anything out more than I have to). Looking ahead in this section (29-21 step 1), I see that we will soon be final-installing the landing gear mounts, and with that step there will be four spacers bolted between the center sections and holding them together. I had the idea to make these spacers now, and temporarily bolt them into place, which ought to hold everything in the proper orientation even with the main attach bolts removed.

Looking at the dimensions for these spacers, I realized this was going to be a bit time consuming and require quite a fair amount of precision. The plans call for AT6-058x5/16 aluminum tubing, which they provide approximately 9" of in the kit. From this tube, I'll need to make four spacers, each 1-11/16" long, with a tolerance of -0" and +1/64"... that's a VERY narrow acceptable range within about 15 thousandths of an inch, between 1.6875" - 1.7031"!

I carefully cut four slightly oversize pieces (1-3/4") using the bandsaw, and then sat down with the belt sander and dial caliper to gently sand away the excess until I had four very close-tolerance spacers:

Measuring the length of the F-1082 Spacers

All four spacers fabricated and labeled with length, all within 0.002"... not bad!

Once the spacers were made, I bolted them into place using the super-long AN3-41A bolts along with a nut and four washers to account for the missing landing gear mount.

Spacers temporarily installed between the center section bulkheads

Once this was done, I removed the nuts from the main wing attach bolts and was free to slide them from side to side in order to get in there with a countersink. Unfortunately, the microstop is too big to fit near the bulkheads here, so the inner-most rows need to be countersunk freehand. No huge deal there, but it's more time consuming and it's hard to get the same consistency we've come to expect using the microstop. In time though, all of the hard-to-reach countersinks were complete, and after a quick double-check session ensuring all the understructure was ready, we could start attaching the skins!

After clecoing the skins into place, the plans have you start at the double row in the middle, where the skins meet and work outward from there. I did this, as well as the rows on the forward and aft sides of the center section, allowing me to re-attach the wing bolts, hopefully for good now until much later on in the build.

Just a few rivets in this area!

Some of the rivets along the sides were quite difficult to get to with a bucking bar (I can't imagine how a person could do it at all without these nifty tungsten bars) but patience and contortionism prevailed. By this time, we had to run to a mid-day family event and didn't return until later, when my friend Roy stopped over with his father, sister and her husband for dinner and to see the project. His father (also named Roy) was quite the handyman back in the day, and when he visited last year I had shown him how to buck a rivet using scrap material. He did such a great job then, I thought this time, why not have him set a rivet on the plane itself?

Roy Jr. (father of Roy III) setting a rivet in the fuselage side skin... he did an excellent job!

He did the first one so well we had him set another!

It was really cool to see him step up to the physical challenge of holding both the gun and bucking bar straight and set the rivet properly. There are adults 1/4 his age who struggle with that kind of precision! Excellent job Roy... you're welcome back anytime!

Return from OSH - Fuse Side Skins

One word sums up our experience last week at AirVenture 2015... wow! We had an absolute blast, from our early arrival Friday 7/17 to our departure on Sunday 7/26 the trip was filled with non-stop adventure and memory-making. Aside from two storms bracketing in our arrival and departure, the weather was literally PERFECT the entire rest of the week! I'll be starting a new section on this website for trip write-ups, and will post many more photos and stories there in the coming weeks. For now, I'll share a photo taken shortly after our return with a quick story:

Back from AirVenture 2015 with some new swag!

Among a few other events, we attended Van's official RV builder's dinner banquet on Tuesday night, which was attended by around 400 people and included a raffle drawing of maybe a dozen or so prizes ranging from t-shirts to tools to gift certificates. Neither Sarah nor I are typically too prone to win prizes at these kinds of events, but as luck would have it we both won something. Sarah won a Van's t-shirt and I won a Cleaveland 3/32" dimple die set... Yay! Both are pictured above. Our sincerest thanks go out to Van and crew, and Cleaveland Tool as well for the gifts... they will be put to good use, we promise!

Anyway, with all the excitement from Oshkosh winding down, bags unpacked, and things settling back into the normal groove it was time to pick up building where we left off. We had a relatively short night in the shop tonight but seemed to get a good amount done. We finished riveting all four fuselage side channels to the firewall and forward bulkheads, and attached the forward fuse longerons to the firewall gusset as well.

Mike riveting the F-1013-L longeron to the F-1001J-L gusset... happy to be back to building!

Sarah also stepped up to the plate with a bold move as well tonight... as anyone who reads this blog knows, I am so fortunate to have "SOS" with this build (significant other support). She is out here in the shop with me quite often and does an excellent job with anything from drilling to deburring to riveting to prosealing. However, she's always been reluctant to read directly from the plans and actually do a part of the build herself without my direct involvement/supervision/etc for fear of messing something up. All charged up from a week at Oshkosh, however, that changed tonight. While I was on a one-man-task pounding some rivets she asked, "What can I do?" and in short order she was reading from page 29-19 and fetching some parts from the shelf to start fabricating the rear vent brackets all on her own. Most of that can be done in parallel as a separate task while I finish some of the one-person tasks with the side skins... Awesome!

Aside from that, the next step is to begin attaching the skins themselves, but before we can do that we'll need to finish countersinking a few of those hard-to-reach holes around the spars. It's only maybe 6 or 7 holes (out of several hundred) left to do, but they will take some time and it sounded like a good stopping point for tonight.

"Fifi" the B-29 is in town at KCID this week and over the weekend, and although we already just spent some quality time with her at Oshkosh, we may be spending a bit more time with her through our local EAA chapter helping the CAF with logistics and security-type tasks over the weekend. If we're not out there doing that, we'll be in the garage working on the RV!

Fuse Side Skins - Departure for OSH

Not much time to build or update the blog this week... it's been busy with work and getting packed and ready for the greatest week of the year! :-)

On Tuesday I did get some priming done over the lunch hour and started riveting the back seat bracing together. I'm not riveting the mid-fuse longerons into place just yet, in fact I may hold off until tailcone attachment if possible. It seems it may be easier to rivet the whole piece in at once rather than have it half-installed for a few months while we get to that stage.

Other than that, the only noteworthy progress was on Wednesday when I started riveting the forward fuse channels on the upper and lower sides. A few of the rivets are pretty tricky to get to and clumsy for one person to rivet and buck, so this may need to wait until after AirVenture to get any further.

Speaking of AirVenture... the time has come! Looking at the forecast, we're thinking it may be a better idea to try and sneak into the N40 tomorrow (Friday) rather than risk being grounded for weather on Saturday. We're hoping to get a good spot near the west bathrooms! Wherever we end up though, I'm sure it will be a great week regardless.

If you're planning on being at OSH15, we hope you'll find us and say hello at any of the Van's social events that are occurring throughout the week, particularly Sun-Tue (RV-10 dinner, RV social, Van's banquet, respectively)! As a sign-off for the week and tribute to AirVenture, I'm sharing a poem I just wrote, shamelessly stealing the theme and several verses from a similar poem I saw on VAF (Credit: Bill Greenley). Cheers, fly safe, and enjoy!

A Visit To Oshkosh

'Twas the night before Oshkosh, up reading the blogs

We could all feel the excitement-- even the dogs

Making a list, and checking it twice

All the stuff that we'll need to camp for eight days and nights

The charts were laid out and a yellow line drawn

With checkpoints from home base straight to Ripon

That's where it begins, now you must fly precise

I know this for sure, I read the whole NOTAM twice

From there we'll find the tracks and continue toward Fisk

Single file, ninety knots they say, to lessen the risk

We'll listen to controllers call out plane after plane

Telling us how to proceed, now that we're in their domain

"Rock your wings to acknowledge," they say with some haste

Making sure all the airplanes stay evenly spaced

Continue up the tracks, or turn right towards the east

It doesn't matter to me, just so we get there in one piece

Turning base in the pattern now, it looks like we're high

On path to land long, on that dot colored with dye

It's hard to stay focused, I hear someone take pics

Of a mustang holding short, and on final a T-6

I see thousands of people standing there at the fence

To know my landing's being judged is making me rather tense

Passing over the dot I hear tires go squeak-squeak

Heading for the grass, we're now home for the week

Taxi to parking, call "mixture, master then mags"

A volunteer in orange stops by as we start unloading our bags

Whisked over to the booth where we get bands for our wrist

Registration and info, and any way they can assist

On the way back to our site, registration in hand

We see more and more airplanes coming in here to land

Spots filling up quickly with planes big and planes small

Some eighty years old, and some built last fall

With excitement we cry "look, an RV!" as an airplane comes near us

But then we look closer and say with dismay, "it's only a Cirrus"

A Trimotor takes off with a great sound of thunder

Where else in the world can you see this kind of wonder?

With our bags unloaded and the plane tied down tight

We put up our tent and bed down for the night

Dreaming of forums and workshops, maybe meeting Bob Hoover

Or flying a simulator to try out that new maneuver

Here’s to the day and night airshows, and friends having a ball

Wishing for fair skies all week, and a "Happy AirVenture" to all!