April 28, 2004

Today I was fortunate enough to take part in a tour of Rutan's Scaled Composites factory up at Mojave. John Rausch had a connection over there and managed to get a group of us sheet-metal-heads into the composite shop. We spent several hours getting an amazing introduction to the SpaceShipOne and White Knight aircraft...or spacecraft, rather. Absolutely amazing stuff. We got to see Fossett's Global Flyer in person and poke our heads around. That sucker is getting ready to make its non-stop around the world journey. I was excited to see that on Global Flyer there's an after-the-fact firesleeve application that looks exactly like mine does on 14D...safety wire wrapped and all. Anyway, I had gotten the full blessing from work to blow off the morning, because this was pretty much a once in a blue moon opportunity. To have an insider's view of the SpaceShipOne program was pretty awe-inspiring. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the folks who are working on that project. After all, it's just another homebuilt.

Bill Palmer, a local RV-8A builder, hopped along with me. The winds were howling up at Mojave, but it was pretty much steady at about 30 knots blowing right down the runway. Larry Hackney had flown up with Robert "Subie" Paisley, whose RV-7 you can see in the background (there were about 6 RVs up there), and Larry snapped this shot just before Bill and I launched and headed back to Chino.

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Dan Checkoway ()