Sharing Heritage Through Rides

With the help of our local FAA office, Historic Flight Foundation has been authorized to offer rides in some of its aircraft. This weekend we will launch this program at our Restoration Hangar, 10719 Bernie Webber Drive in Mukilteo. It is expensive to offer these opportunities and consequently, expensive to participate ($125-$450 depending on the aircraft), but some will participate themselves and some will give the gift of flight to others. One group waiting for this opportunity since General Aviation Day on May 15th has pooled its resources to send a friend, a Boeing engineer, on a ride tomorrow. Our guest is an avid pilot, student of history and cancer patient in chemotherapy. We hope that whatever challenges he faces on the ground can be left behind during our sojourn around Puget Sound.

As a follow-up to the Tigercat brake test, the brakes worked fine. So at long last the Tigercat is operational without asterisk or footnote, right? Well, that was true for a few moments until I hit a bird. RIP fellow aviator. The impact occurred just outside the port oil cooler intake creating a shallow depression about the size of a cantaloupe. Some rather tricky metalwork will be required. I didn’t notice the strike until a visual wing check before folding the wings during taxi. The first clue was an area of paint undercoating and feathers.

Also this week our DC-3 was flown from Victoria to Campbell River, B.C. I’ll share the story of our DC-3 in a later post.

Thanks for your interest.