Denver Cozy Visit

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Terri and I drove to Denver on Friday to borrow a Cozy turtledeck jig from Rick Maddy. Rick is doing excellent work on his Cozy and I was going to take some pictures of Rick’s shop, but forgot my camera. Then I realized that he’s recording all of his progress here so not having a camera wasn’t a big deal. Rick graciously hosts many Cozy/canard pages on his server and also provides an excellent search engine to do keyword searches through more than 10 years of postings on the Cozy and Canard Aviator’s mailing lists. It’s lightening fast and a great asset to the community.

Cozy Turtleback Jig

The turtledeck is the shell that goes behind the canopy of the Cozy. It’s shown in crosshatch below. Don and I were looking for an indoor job for the winter months and I’m pretty sure that this will keep us busy for a while. Some of the canopy/turtledeck construction has to be done with the fuselage, but the part where we need the jig can be done without having access to the fuselage. The fuselage is at the airport in an unheated hangar and so we won’t be doing any layups there until spring.

Cozy Turtleback Jig

We decided that we’d go to the Cherry Creek mall since we were already in the neighborhood. I was surprised to find it rather uncrowded, probably because we got there in the late afternoon, despite it being ‘Black Friday’. I took the opportunity to see what was new at the Apple store and to physically handle all the newer products like the Mac mini, iPod Nano, and iPod with video. It’s obvious by looking at these devices that they are missing features that wouldn’t be negotiable at other companies. One typical requirement is that the products should be serviceable and upgradable. I’ve owned an iPod for a few years and the battery life is now at the point where it can barely get me through a 1 hour walk. I know that I’m going to have to bite the bullet and either do it myself or send it back to Apple. A cottage industry offering batteries and iPod surgery instructions arose around this controversial decision (as well as a class action lawsuit) and now Apple has tried to make amends by reducing the battery replacement cost from $100 to $60, which is probably still a profitable undertaking for them, considering all the iPod batteries will need replacement eventually. It’s hard to imagine what they might have been thinking when the original decision was made. Had they added a few small screws to the rear case and a reasonable battery replacement price, all that ill will and associated costs it generated would have been averted.

The Mac-mini is an interesting concept, but considering it costs nearly 2x what an equivalent-feature PC would cost, its small size carries quite a high premium. By the time you get it configured with the options you need, like a larger hard drive and more memory, you’re looking at $700 and that’s before adding the cost of a display, keyboard, and mouse. You could use cheap versions of each of those components, but that would be like dressing a supermodel in baggy overalls. Ideally, you’d want the Apple bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse and a 20″ cinema display and so you would add another $920, bringing the total to $1620. That puts a new light on the entry level $499 mac mini price. You might even consider going with the 20″ iMac G5 for $1699, which is probably what Apple would like their customers to do…

I enjoy visiting the Apple Store, not so much because I’m an Apple fan, but because it provides a quick way to see everything they have to offer and give their products a test drive. Since Apple doesn’t really use very many retail outlets in the U.S., the Apple store is the best way to check it out before you buy it. It surprises me that Dell can get away with selling PC’s without any retail presence. It seems odd that someone would make a major purchase like that sight-unseen. I suppose some people just go to a local retailer, test out an ‘equivalent’ PC, and then buy on-line from Dell, thereby saving themselves the retailer’s commission.

JetBlue Landing

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I was amazed at the amount of news coverage of the successful JetBlue landing that took place a few weeks ago that resulted in a landing of a disabled aircraft with minimal damage and no injuries.

JetBlue nosegear ground down after successful landing

Usually, the mainstream news only likes to cover air disasters, but they covered some very good news in this case. But I’ll bet you didn’t know the whole story, and that is that the pilot was assured that the nose gear was OK, and that he only had a sensor problem. He remained calm and didn’t make any rash decisions such as retracting the nose gear and chose to land at the nearest suitable airport.

The pilot really is a hero in my view, especially for avoiding the press and not showboating his performance, which was quite remarkable.

More Cozies and Corn Mazes

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I am trying a bit of an experiment today. I’m typing this entry on a PocketPC and using a wireless connection to update my blog. I’d like to add a few photos and I will plan to do that later since we made a little progress on the Cozy yesterday and took a few pictures of it. I won’t try the extra credit experiment of adding photos from the PocketPC.

Don and I moved the canard out to the hangar to get it mounted on the fuselage. After the canard is mounted, we can start on Chapter 13, installing the nose on the fuselage, hopefully before it gets too cold outside to do layups. We’ve skipped around a bit and already have the main spar (Chapter 14) and Wings (Chapters 19 and 20) finished.

I also promised to put a link in the blog for my friend, JD’s cornmaze webpage so that it will get picked up by search engines. It’s the only corn maze in Fort Collins. It’s also quite convenient if you live in Loveland and Greeley. I blogged about it a few weeks ago, but since then, we took another flight over it and JD captured more than 40 photos along with some video segments and combined them all into a nice little 3 minute web video which I’ve uploaded to my website for your viewing pleasure. It will give you a little bit of a feeling of what it’s like to fly in a LongEZ over the front range near Fort Collins.

The canard being transported out to the airport
The Cozy wings in my hangar
Don't worry, we'll replace the duct tape before flight!

Cozies and Corn Mazes

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Last weekend we had some visitors stop by to stay with us. Marc and Deanie Zeitlin were on their way across the U.S. as they moved from Massachusetts to Mojave, CA. I first met Marc on-line around 1995 when he had posted something on rec.aviation about starting a Cozy mailing list. I had just purchased Cozy plans and had yet to start building and I asked to be added to the list. I like to say I was his first member, but he insists I was the second, since he was the first. I still say he was the founder, but I was the list’s first member because a discussion group cannot exist if there is only one member :-). Marc’s done a great job at administering the list over the past 10+ years, a virtual centennial in Internet years. He is on his way to go work for the legendary Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites and so we had a BBQ at the airport in his honor to wish him well. Marc also wrote up a travelogue of his journey that you can find here.

At the time I started building the Cozy, I was flying a Piper Colt and had just moved to Colorado from Pennsylvania for the second time. The Colt was well-suited for the short grass fields available up and down the east coast, but was a bit of a mismatch for the high density altitude, long paved fields in the West. With a cruise speed of 105 mph, it was not unusual for cars to make better time, particularly if there was much of a headwind. With the 75 mph speed limits on the straight highways we have out west and cars tending to push that a little bit, a 25 kt headwind could be a humbling experience in the Colt. So, I thought, I already have a plane, why not replace it with one that more closely matches the one I’m building? Against the advice of many who knew better than I did, I bought the LongEZ and sold the Colt. My friends told me that once I got the LongEZ, progress on the Cozy would grind to a halt, which turned out to be somewhat true. Had it not been for the help and motivation of my good friend Don, the Cozy project would likely have not seen any progress in the intervening years. Owning an airplane is a time and money drain. It seems whenever you’re not flying it, you’re working on it or thinking about it and I expect that the ratio of working on a plane to flying is at least 2:1. So that eats into spare time that could be used building an airplane. As a result, Marc has been flying his Cozy for the past 3 years and mine is still a bunch of parts, no more than half way to being done. It’s OK though since I’ve enjoyed the LongEZ which I’ve flown to Oshkosh 9 times and haven’t missed out on having the extra room to hold the 2 more people the Cozy will provide. Terri doesn’t much care for the back seat of the LongEZ though, where she frequently falls asleep, and she tells me she’d much prefer to be sitting up front where the view is much better. If memory serves me correctly, I believe she used to fall asleep in the front seat of the Colt on long journeys, so we’ll see how much a difference a front seat will make for her when the Cozy is finally flying.

Yesterday I flew for a short while with my friend Don and took some aerial photos of a few corn mazes in the area. I had promised a friend I’d take a picture of a maze he made for a church fund raising near his home and also took the opportunity to take one of a very famous corn maze they have in LaSalle. Each year the corn maze in LaSalle has a theme and this years it’s called ‘Kings of Soul and Rock and Roll’ featuring images of Ray Charles and Elvis Presley. There is also an inflatable haunted house that looks like a giant laying it its back.

I also flew over the new Larimer County fairgrounds where they were having a motorcycle rally called ‘Thunder in the Rockies’. I had debated about taking a motorcycle ride over there, but it’s very Harley-centric and since I’ve parted with the Harley, I’m not sure how we’d fit in on the BMW and Ducati :-). Alice Cooper is performing at the event tonight. I recall that it’s been nearly 32 years ago that I bought my first 8-track tape called ‘Billion Dollar Babies’. That’s a long career for a Rock and Roll star that seemed to be living on the edge way back then. 🙂