President’s Corner

by Scott Thompson
Chapter President

Summer is upon us in spirit (heat) if not yet by the calendar. Spring occurred on Wednesday, May 29th, this year and if you were out of town, well, sorry, better luck next year. As I write this we have jumped right into the oven with temperatures climbing above one hundred degrees, blue skies, and beautiful nights. This begins the time of year when the TV weathercasters can just phone it in…clear and hot, clear and hot, clear and hot…call me in September.

But the flying is good, either in the cooler mornings or on an afternoon flight above 8.000’ to beat the heat, or maybe a flight to the coast for lunch at Half Moon Bay and some sixty-five degree fog.

For those of us our chapter who are thinking ahead to those summer activities in our chapter hangar…well, good news, because some clever guys and gals have installed four fans from the ceiling of the hangar to keep the air moving on summer evenings, and we’ve also added more insulation to the hangar ceiling. It is all an effort to wrap up the improvements planned for our chapter home. We are almost there…just a few more tasks to do before we call the effort just about over and out. Thanks to those volunteers for their time and talents for doing that work. You may not appreciate it now as you sit in your air conditioned easy chair sipping that ice tea, but come our next summer evening meeting (on Wednesday, June 19) your appreciation may appreciably increase.

So, for summer our chapter is planning a round of activities. Besides the normal pancake breakfasts, BBQ lunches, and dinner meetings, we also have on the boards an effort to support the city of Lincoln as they put on a specialty Aviation Summer camp for youth during the last week of June. We’ll have a group of ten kids working with chapter volunteers in our hangar each afternoon during that week learning about airplanes and having some fun.

We also hope to have and encourage some more chapter flyouts on summer Saturdays to different airports up and down the valley, and up and down the mountains.

And, we can celebrate that our chapter is sponsoring two young women, Sarah Wallin and Amy Whelan, to attend the EAA Air Academy
at Oshkosh during weeks in July. This is the first effort by our chapter to provide such a sponsorship so we look forward with eagerness to hear about their experiences. The support is coming from our chapter’s Richard and Sue Bristow Memorial Scholarship Fund. We will take lessons learned from Amy and Sarah as we move forward and duplicate the effort for the 2020 Air Academy sessions to be held next year.