Admit it: There’s just no way that you can come back from Oshkosh without something for your airplane, or project, or living room wall! There’s so much to see that’s new that you just gotta have, and it costs so much to go there, that NOT buying something is pretty hard to justify (see how I wrap that justification thing around?). The same is true for all of us, and while I’ve been telling people that for the first time in years I don’t have an airplane kit in the shop, I now have a number of projects in the shop that I’ll be sharing with readers and other pilots in the future.
The first is an “On-Speed” AoA system that (full disclosure) Mike Vacaro, winner of the Foundation Prize for his work on Angle of Attack, provided to me from their grant money—I didn’t pay for it. It will go in my RV-8, along with the existing AFS Pro AoA system I have been flying with for years and in fact will also compete against the derived AoA I have on my GRT EFIS.
Second, I picked up a Garmin GSU-25 for our RV-3 – this will also give us AoA capability for the G3X Touch in that airplane. It doesn’t have it already because we have the old GSU-73 “silver box”, the original ADAHRS for the original G3X in that airplane, which doesn’t have AoA capability. We’ll add the GSU-25 to the CAN bus and will experiment with a pop-rivet AoA sense port in the leading edge of the wing. We’ll also compare that the AFS Pro we have in that airplane.
On the way (but not pictured) will be an addition to the AoA from Alpha Systems in our Tundra—a new indicator that should give us a better line-of-site because it will mount to the top of the windshield and we’ll be able to look through it in our normal sight line.
So much Angle of Attack!
Unrelated to AoA, we picked up some LED lighting for our eXenos, which currently has no lights at all. This is a dual-light system from Flyleds that we’ll install as recognition lights, along with a flasher unit in the switch to make them wig-wag. We fly the eXenos so close to our airport, essentially in and above the traffic pattern, so I really want it to have some sort of anti-collision lighting… and now it will!
So I will disappear into the shop once we recover from the trip and finish all of the immediate writing projects generated by the show. Combined with some new pilot reports we put on the calendar, AirVenture 23 will continue to fill my schedule for months to come!
