Hard at Work
Time flies when you are having fun! And boy has it been a fun two months. When last I updated you all, we were all heading down to Sun ‘n Fun, and it did not disappoint. Other than the one obligatory afternoon of thunderstorms, it was all sun, and all fun. We had a great time at our awesome booth location. We were in the far corner lot of the exhibit, but right off the flight line, so close in fact, that the cones they put out to mark out the airshow perimeter had to go around the front of our plane during the show!
We had three great displays all week. We had our P-36A, of course. Brian Kelly was showing off a Verner Scarlett 9S on his award winning RV-8R, and Steve Wolf brought the firewall forward of his newest project, a one-off scale P-47 with another 9S. Needless to say, we were always busy! Thank you to all of our fans, beta builders, depositors, and engine customers who stopped by to say hello and enjoy the prime location to watch the world class airshow. Also, a big thank you to all of our new fans, new friends, and future customers whom we met in April. We had hundreds of people sign up for the mailing list, and if you haven’t seen it yet, we have a link for our MailChimp account in the contact section.
Most excitingly, we got to fly in the Showcase on Saturday! After a few casual conversations and talking to the right people, we were able to fly not one, but two airplanes in the show. We shut down the booth in order to take both the P-36A LightFighter and the RV-8R in up the morning Showcase. Air Show Legend Steve Wolf (its official, his picture is hanging in the Hall of Fame) loved flying the P-36 so much the week before Sun ‘n Fun, he volunteered to fly it again in the Showcase! He was also able to get permission to have Brian fly his RV-8R. Sam provided the announcing to the tens of thousands in attendance, while we got to demonstrate both the LiteFighter prototype, as well as both a 7U and a 9S Verner radial. We totally were not prepared to be demoing at Sun ‘n Fun, and forgot to pack the good cameras to capture the moment. Cell phone pics don’t do it justice, so if you have any good shots from Sun ‘n Fun, let us know.
As for the past two months since getting home, we have been hard at work. We are working on kitting out the first set of tails, rudders, horizontals, and elevators for our beta builders. We are calling it our ‘vertical slice’: a microcosm of the overall kitting process. While bespoke aircraft parts are great on a one-off homebuilt, they aren’t so great when it comes to kits. Even though our beta builders are all competent builders, we didn’t want to just send them a stack of cut sheetmetal, some tubes, and a drawing and tell them to figure it out. We want to ensure we can scale up quickly and efficiently while maintaining our self imposed high standards for quality. This means we have been formalizing our part numbering system, optimizing fixtures and jigs, developing build instructions, identifying which forming and sub assemblies we should do, and constantly improving the design. We are also wrapping up the engineering and design changes to improve and optimize other parts of the aircraft based on the lessons learned from the prototype. And yes, there will be retracts on the future models.
Lastly, I’ve been wearing the bucket hat pretty much daily for the past two months, it fits great and looks slick. You can buy your own over at the PX.
-Aaron Ide
P.S. I’m shamelessly putting in a few pictures of my adorable daughter Miriam who absolutely LOVED her first airshow. We taught her the sign language for ‘airplane’ at the show, and now she still signs and points to any airplane she sees in the sky. I’m so proud :-)
