The Visit to Oshkosh.

Man what a week !! I thought I had pretty much everything sorted. So this week I started down the track of organising the ATA Carnet. 

In the process I needed to get the contact details of the agent in the USA so I contacted my shipper (new one now since the original one was not particularly helpful) and he said they don't usually accept a Carnet in the USA. Added to this.. the bank won't secure enough deposit since our house is worth too much !! (WTF?).

As I look further into this it looks like the way to do it is with a TIB (temporary import bond) in the USA. It will work out better since the bond will only be for a shorter time period but it needs confirming. 

So now I wait to hear from the shipper.

All this was brought about by the first shipper who, now it seems, didn't know what he was doing and wasnt really interested.

I'll be glad to get through this bit. The clock is ticking.

The trim would be quite time consuming to disconnect and re-connect so I've added a joint in the middle.

That should mean I won't need to remove any of the cabin seating or consoles..

Pretty simple mod but it all counts.

Also all the electronic cables have connectors except the main battery cables which will need to be removed.. shouldn't be too much drama.

If I get my plane up to Chino successfully and then spend the next 4 weeks putting it together there will be a huge opportunity lost. I simply won't be able to afford a huge amount of time putting it together and pulling it apart again.

So I've embarked on a plan to make it as 'plug and play' as I can.

So far I've re-wired pretty much anything forward of the firewall to reroute it through a mil-spec circular connector. Hopefully this will save a significant amount of time just snapping the connector in and the engine sensors are up and running.

Bryn (hangar next to mine) had just imported a small plane from France which came packed in this crate inside a 20’ container. I figured I need wood so I asked him and he gave it to me. In the process of breaking it down and chatting with him it became apparent I have another hurdle. The wood used for packing is required to be heat treated and certified. Along with this I would need paperwork. I kept the small bits with the stamps proving heat treatment but as for the paperwork? Something else to check on !

Good news though.. I got an email back from sidelifters in CA and they can move my container even though they do get backed up... whew.. a load off my mind

I thought this one would be tricky but with a quick email to Duane in the USA he told me that it is common to purchase fuel with a Visa card since so much choice made a single company's fuel card impractical. Added to this, some companies give a small discount for using Visa.. even better..

Box ticked.. move on!

So the time had come to go to the USA and test the ground for what was to come. Vicki and I had just had our 10th wedding anniversary and she had the need to shop so it was a perfect time to hit the USA.

While Vicki shopped, I hit Chino.

I briefly met up with Ray Hecker, who was busy flying on a young eagles weekend.

WOW, there are some great aviation sites to be seen at that airport. I spent most of the day visiting aeroplane museums but did get an idea of where things were and how my whole adventure might play out.

I also had a meeting with the Riverside FAA FSDO reps. Expecting to just waltz into the building, I was a bit surprised at the security required to get in to what appears to be a fairly unassuming building. Once in though the guys were great, I had been put off balance a little bit by the security but these guys were very friendly and genuinely keen to help me through the process. So it appears that what will happen is that I will need to show them the Falco in the container, this is just to check for no shipping damage. Then they will return when it is together and ready to fly. They then give me a test area over a lake to “shake down” the machine. According to John who said “we aren’t going to kill you with this” it will just be an hour or so. Then I get a “program Letter” which releases me to go flying in the USA to go to Oshkosh etc. The program letter is reasonably specific on destinations but that is fine with me since Oshkosh is my main one.

After my meeting with Ray I had come to the realization that I needed to get on with some of the organisation myself, so while I was waiting for my return flight I hit the net. What I found was pure delight.

In San Francisco area there is an Expat Kiwi who has started up a swing lift trucking company called Kiwi Container Lifting. OK that is in SFO but on his site he also had a couple of links for a few other small companies doing the same thing and one quoting LA. Great.. that is a huge relief and now the process begins to get a whole lot simpler.

What a great trip !

So with a quick look at the US terminal charts it became fairly clear that I had some learning to do. The layout is quite different from ours and there are lots of coloured lines and shaded areas that made no sense at all to me. Clearly I would need to get this sorted out before taking on such a mission.

So I went back to the internet and ordered some training videos from the people that arguably have made the most impact on pilot training in the USA, John and Martha King.

The videos at first appear a little cheesy but you quickly fit into their relaxed style and compared to most learning I’ve ever done I would say they are the most easy to understand, well paced and enjoyable training systems I’ve ever used.

I didn’t anticipate actually having fun but these made the whole exercise a lot of fun. So much so I’m going to get more. Some of the stuff is fairly basic but its so enjoyable that its fun to have a look back at the basics again.

Step one of the ‘Get the plane ready’ steps was to update the GPS. Truth is that I was going to do this anyway but since the last one was starting to become difficult to get data for, I updated it for a true panel mount aircraft GPS. Here it is mounted in my plane. I haven’t really tried it out much yet but it is step one.

When I go to the USA I can buy USA map data over the internet and load it in via the data card.

Looks pretty cool huh?

It has been a time of frustration to some degree. It was important to find the correct place to send the machine to. I really wanted an airfield that:

1. a) wasn’t too far from Long Beach port.

2. b) preferably East of Long beach.

3. c)was big enough to have services and storage.

4. d)has accommodation and rental cars nearby along with public transport for later on.

5. e)has a good EAA chapter for assistance

After struggling with a few places and their contacts, I decided to try a few Falco builders.. I was almost resigned to going to plan B using San Francisco as the entry point (port of Oakland).

I tried Dan Dorr.. he a pilot with Southwest. He’s obviously a busy man. He offered a few suggestions but he is in the SFO area which isn’t my first choice mainly due to Air NZ not flying there as often as LAX.

Then I tried Ray Hecker. He arranges the West Coast fly-in each year. He bought a pre-loved Falco and he is a super keen Falcoholic. I couldn’t have asked for more. overnight I got three info packed emails with lots of helpful advise. He is based at Chino in LA and suggested I launch from there. With help like that I couldn’t say no. I was excited again!

AND.. We’ve got a cat called Cino (pronounced Chino) so I have to.. right?

Well today I had a rude shock !

I thought I’d contact my shipping people just to keep in touch.

The photo above is boring right?  Just a picture of a truck with a swing lift. You see them all the time right?  Well if you live in the USA this may as well be a time machine because they don’t have them. Eh? Yup.. no such thing up there. If you want to get your cantainer off the back of the truck and onto the ground there are 2 options. 1- you can’t ! or 2- you balance the bloody thing on a huge forklift. YIKES! eh? imagine that.. a 40’ container balancing on a forklift.

What this basically means is that I need to either be in the USA and find a loading bay where I unload the aeroplane from the container while the truckdriver waits ( this apparently is the common method ! - what a mega pain!) or I find somewhere that has a gargantuan forklift that can do the job I need. Both methods are a bloody pain in the rear!

Crikey.. about time the USA learnt a thing or two from us Kiwi’s !

With the falco shipping to the USA I wouldn’t want to spend all of my precious leave from work re-building the plane so I need to make the whole process as painless as possible. The tail will need to be removed in order to get it into the container. That will involve removing the rear fuel tank and disconnecting the rudder and elevator control cables. That becomes an issue getting a duplicate inspection when I reassemble but I should be able to get authority for a local from the EAA to sign that off.

Getting the tank out is a pain and I don’t want to create leaks in the system so I may look for some quick disconnect I can install in the line beforehand. The rest of the wires there should be easy enough to put connectors in the lines. Radio antenna and strobe light cables plus the elt antenna.

Up front the engine will need to come off. Looking at it, I think the best way is to remove the mount and everything attached to it at the four main bolts plus one in the drag link for the nose gear. Then I can retract the mains and the upper drag link without disturbing the gear timing. There are a couple of other feed wires to the alternator and starter that need to come off, a manifold pressure tube, a fuel line and a bunch of electrical items. I figure that if I put circular connectors in the lines for the electrical ancillaries then I can save a bunch of time right there. The biggest pain in the bum is the 4 control cables, namely manifold pressure, Prop and mixture along with cabin heat. I may be able to change the cabin heat method or even remove it just for the trip since it will be summer. I mean it was 39 degrees in Kansas City on the way back this year so I doubt I’ll need heat. 

For now I’ll work on the electrical connectors and maybe ideas will pop into my head as I am working in there.

The only other item to remove would be the canopy.. not a big job.. just needs to be handled carefully.

Of course in all this will be the need for other sets of hands.. especially when it comes to rotating the fuselage to fit it in the container and ditto with the tail.. 

More thinking required but hopefully something will pop into my head.

Now that this thing had my attention I needed to fill in a few blanks. Answer so many questions that had filled my head since this popped in there in the first place.

I mean..

Could I fit the Falco in a container?

If I could, could I do it reasonably quickly? - it would be no point to have to spend a month or even a week for that matter, putting it back together.

It was going to be expensive.. but just how much?

Would I be allowed to do it?

What paperwork did I need and who do I need to tell?

When would I go?

How much time would I need?

etc.etc.etc.

So I needed to make a start I guess so I figured I could set a date. Next year seemed a bit close to get this organised so why not 2012. No good reason why not I guess and I needed something to work toward so tentatively, 2012 it is!

I also spun the idea past Mike and Bryn at Parakai. They didn’t look too strangely at me. I think Mike thought I was a bit nuts but then as Bryn got excited about the idea the brainstorm took hold. 

With all the discussion and a bit of web research this was looking more and more doable.

Somewhere along the line the idea came out that I needed to contact the EAA. From all the ideas of people to contact, this seemed like the obvious first point of contact.

That night I put together an email to the EAA information center and within 3 days I had an email back with a lot of the  legal info I needed. In fact the reply even involved words like “simple” and “easy” and had references to website instructions and links to forms.

Most of it was based around aircraft flying into the USA such as Canadian private pilots but from what I could read, I fit a lot of these categories and with EAA sponsorship it was all going to be within the realm of possibility.

A few guys at work looked at me as if I was mad but then pilots are famous for being tight.

They way I figured it, people often spend tens of thousands of dollars on holidays with business class upgrades etc. then I can spend that kind of money on my holdiday too, only with a shipping company !. OK.. that still is weird !

“Am I going nuts?” I thought to myself.

The idea of getting my Falco to Oshkosh was new to me but why hasn’t it been done? If it has, why not more often? I must be nuts!

OK so there was no way I wanted to fly my Falco across the Pacific so that is one thing in my favour of mental stability but it still seemed like I was out on a limb. Yes the exercise would be expensive but given the cost of the ‘hobby’ in the first place I would be surprised if money was the only reason that I was 'giving birth' to this idea. An idea that by now seemed so obvious.

I thought I better spin it by someone else.

I felt a bit silly when I first began to air the idea to Darryn but he seemed to pick up the idea with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm himself so surely that was a good sign? Over the next hour or so we started throwing a few ideas back and forth and from then on I knew I had to follow this up.

What a great experience it would be to fly my own creation across the USA to visit the home of the homebuilt. To join in with all the other homebuilders across the USA in such massive numbers seems like it would finally legitimize what I had done by building my own aeroplane in the first place. Maybe after that there would be nothing left to do but what was really exciting was that this has my attention back to how it was when I first started building the Falco. Maybe this is why I did it in the first place but I just didn’t know it.

I can’t let this drop without finding out more.

2010 was the first year I had been to Oshkosh. It had been a long time coming really but for most homebuilders it is a bit of a religious experience. The home of the EAA, most homebuilders visit Oshkosh at some stage.

I enjoyed the meet. I call it a meet rather than an airshow since I feel that is what it is really. The air display is OK but that is all, I’ve seen better.

It was the final day of the meet and the daily show had just finished. The place had already begun to empty out the day prior but once the daily show had ended the floodgates openned and every aeroplane on the field was in a departure queue setting the airfield up to be a ghost town.

In front of me I watched as a woman with two battens controlled taxi flow like some kind of ballet when it hit me.

“I need to get more involved with this”

I didn’t really know what I meant. It was like someone was telling me something that hadn’t been thoroughly explained.

Slowly over the next half hour it dawned on me what I needed to do. I needed to have my Falco at Oshkosh!