Whaddaya expect, the Bahamas?
Our false spring, with temperatures in the 70s and sunshine, was brief ... maybe a week. Now the coffee break is over and we're back on our heads (ask a grey beard to tell you the joke), the last gusts of a winter reluctant to pass are upon us. March is the month that gave the mountaineers of Western North Carolina the Blizzard of '93, vividly remembered by the talking weatherheads on TV who weren't born yet.
What was covered, on and off, with snow is now underwater thanks to the beavers who dam up the streams that drain our airport, sending our floodwaters via Bat's Fork to Mud Creek, the French Broad River, the Tennessee River, the Mississippi and then, finally to the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans will have to wait for this and while New Orleans waits, so do we.
And while we wait, we build airplanes. Here in Steve's workshop, we learn all about fitting wing ribs to the main spar of a pretty early Van's RV-4 kit. The early kits could be challenging. The components didn't always match up to the drawings and the instructions didn't either. Today's kits are much simplified with CNC dimensioned parts, pre-drilled and matched to fit precisely right. Steve is no novice builder, having built 2 other Van's airplanes, but he confessed he had used up the beer and wine pantry trying to figure out some of the bits and pieces of this RV. Fortunately, the kit had hardly been messed with during the 20-odd years other owners had it, though some of the parts have to be replaced due to corrosion, man or mouse made.
All in all, March is a month when we begin to see the first glimmers of spring. We fix and fiddle and tweak in preparation for a season of flying. Then some damn fool starts a war and we have uncertainty and skyrocketing fuel prices and we start to wonder if there's a conspiracy to keep us from what we enjoy doing.
