Sonex Builders and Pilots Foundation update

[Sonex1517]

Greetings Sonex/Waiex/Onex/Xenos pilots, owners, enthusiasts, and builders!

Just an update from your Sonex Builders and Pilots Foundation.

The entire Board of Directors for the foundation was at the 10th annual ASA fly in Held at the Crossville, TN airport and ASA was gracious enough to allow us to do a presentation at the event - if you missed the event, we posted photos at http://sonexfoundation.com/Past_Events.php

We'd like to congratulate ASA on having 40 aircraft at the event (41 if you count the Onex under construction that was on display). That represents nearly 10% of the flying Sonex fleet, and is a huge milestone.

What surprised me personally was the number of builders and pilots who had not heard of us. We're trying not to overdo the updates on the forums, but we also want to make sure folks know we are here.

So if you haven't done so, please check out http://sonexfoundation.com - some of our most recent updates include:

Joe Norris, Chief Flight Instructor at Sonex Aircraft, LLC, sent us an article about his thoughts regarding transition training in Sonex type aircraft. You can find his article on our Transition Training page.

Doug Raby, Sonex 1189 builder, shared an article with us about his recent trek from Ontario, Canada to the ASA fly in.

Dana Baker, Sonex 1534 builder, shared a tip for grinding the side of a microstop countersink cage to allow access to holes next to structure that require countersinking. Visit the Files section of the Tips & Tricks page.

Sonex 1230 owner, Mark Waldron, sent us an article about his setup for turning on his engine heater remotely during cold weather to warm his AeroVee engine. His article is posted in the Files section of our Tip & Tricks page.

Also, we've added a new page. Dana Baker offered to make some of his tools available for loan. Visit the Tool Loan Program page to find out more information.

For those that listened in to the EAA Webinar that Sonex did on flight data recording, we are going to begin a project to gather flight data for specific engine, prop, and airframe combinations so anyone interested in real world data can see numbers from actual flights. As part of this project, we are going to ask pilots to submit their data and aircraft specifics (configuration, engine, propeller, etc) for publication on our web site, and to schedule the first "data day" in 2014 where we ask pilots to fly a specific set of data sets and submit the results.

We hope this serves as a useful and long term data set for anyone interested in comparisons or analysis. If you missed the webinar, be sure to go watch the archived version - it was fantastic!

We invite interested builders and pilots to join our foundation - see http://sonexfoundation.com/Become_a_Member.html -- membership has two levels, free membership is available for anyone, and for $25 you can become a voting member and help support the foundation and vote in our annual meetings. Details are on the web site.

blue skies
Robbie Culver
Sonex 1517
President, Sonex Builders and Pilots Foundation