The Arlington Fly-In & CWB Orientation

I woke up this morning just in time to head down to Lake Union to be oriented as a volunteer for the Center for Wooden Boats.  It was pretty straightfoward, and Stefan had basically already filled me in on everything. Neat to see a wide range of people there, from my age to significantly older.  I signed up to volunteer at the Livery (where they rent boats), working on Puffin (a 1 cylinder steam ship), and volunteering at the boat shop.  I'll have to get checked out to take out the sailboats here pretty soon too.  Sounds like they run a lot of interesting classes, so I'll probably take some of those as well.

After that, I headed back up towards the Arlington Fly-In with my friend Ian.  It was absolutely nuts.  There were more airplanes than cars, and a ton of homebuilts, and old planes, in addition to an airshow.  If I had to use one word to describe it, it would be heaven.  There was even a Pietenpol, although the use of a Continental engine is less than ideal.  A real man would put the Model A Ford engine in her.  There was some other neat stuff including a B-17, a B-25, a bunch of Fleet and Travel-Air biplanes, apparently the only open cockpit airplane Stinson ever built, a Bowers Fly Baby, and the list goes on.  But I digress.  Below are a couple of random pictures.  For reference the Curtiss OX5 is a V-8 that went in trainers during WWI.  They built a bunch of them (I believe around 10k), but as a pre-WWII engine a lot of them disappeared in scrap drives so they are hard to find today.  However, someone who is after one is my kind of guy.

Also I was leaving to get in my car, a woman came up to me and asked me how I liked my car.  I said I loved it, she said she was thinking about getting one as she had recently gotten rid of her Toyota Tercel... with 550k miles on it!!  Wow.