This week has been a little hectic and next week will without a doubt be tougher. Every year there is a world wide event the Saturday before Halloween called Thrill The World, my wife and I organize the San Jose / Silicon Valley event. As you can imagine with the event coming up on October 23rd we are rather busy getting stuff ready. Our group Grave Mistake has only a couple more dance workshops before Thrill Day. This makes for a crazy day-job schedule to go along with the fun-stuff, and that doesn’t include the aircraft project! While I will be trying to get at least a little done, buying some materials at least, doing some milling at most, this week and next are a bit tight on time.
I do have something cool to report though. You may remember on September 21st I filed for an N-number with the FAA through there online system. For those that may not know what I am talking about; the N-number is an aircrafts identification number, it is also referred to as the tail number. They said it would take up to three weeks to get the confirmation letter. I put October 13th on my calendar as a follow-up date to check back with the FAA if I had not received my confirmation letter. Being excited about the project, I checked back every so often to see if the FAA had processed my request. The website says that they update the reserved N-number database weekly, so that’s about how often I checked back. The number I submitted kept coming back as available. Until… the 12th of October! I still have not received the written confirmation but the number shows up in the database as being reserved for ME! WOOT!
As you might have guessed by the title of this post and the little addition to the header graphic, oh, and the giant VP tail to the right, my N-number for this project is N49FB Fox-trot Bravo of course for Fly Boy. If I could have gotten Fox-trot Bravo Juliet I would have, but that does not fit in the numbering convention used by the FAA so Fox Bravo it is. I just like the way the short number sounds… niner fox bravo… if just sounds cool to me. Okay, I’m getting a little too AvGeeky even for me now.
On a builders note; I mentioned in the last post about doing some work with composites on my day-job. That is progressing and I have been reading up on the process as time permits. The more I think about it the more I think I will do the cowling myself. I am still not sure about doing the turtle deck. I have seen a number of VP-1 and VP-2 examples with and without the dome called for in the plans. That is way down the line, so I’m not going to burn a whole lot of cycles on it just yet. I also need to see how fast I can re-acquire my old rusty fiberglass skills.
Thats it for now.
Blue skies and tailwinds,
~Jon