EAA Chapter 186

Our July 11 Young Eagles Rally is re-scheduled for Warrenton Airport from 9:00 AM
to 1:00 PM.

Thank you to our volunteerswho helped staff the Women Can Build workstation where participants learned the basics of filing, drilling, deburring, clecoing, bending and riveting while making a cellphone stand. This is always a very rewarding experience for those who help with this activity. We helped about 50 people build a cellphone stand. One young girl got back in line three times. By the third one, she could have taught the whole process! While this is not a Chapter 186 event, per se, it gives us visibility when our 186 members are there helping the GA community show itself off to the public. Sarah Patten says they gave 215 rides!

Speaking of volunteering, Chapter 186 has just been named once again as a Gold Chapter. Only because our chapter members continually keep our core activities going that we’re recognized among the top level of chapters. While we’re probably one of the larger chapters, size of chapter is not a factor in this determination. EAA uses a checklist of several activities to determine if a chapter can earn Bronze, Silver or Gold. Thank you to all who keep us going! Our growing membership, tool crib, Flight Advisor and Technical Counselor programs, participation in IMC Club and VMC Club meetings and Young Eagles and the Ray Scholarship all help give us visibility in the chapter Recognition Program. We now have another Gold Seal banner to hang on the wall!

Please note: Our July 11 Young Eagles Rally is re -scheduled for Warrenton Airport from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM.

Don’t forget we will not have a July member gathering on the usual fourth Saturday of the month due to conflict with AirVenture. If you are at AirVenture we will have a breakfast gathering on Tuesday July 21 at 8:00 AM at the Tailwinds Café. Breakfast is on your own. We will grab a couple tables under the vendor pavilion. Note that the Tailwinds Café is operated by Parker John’s BBQ so look for either name on the signs. Location is K- 9 on the AirVenture map, a short walk east from the Forums/Workshop stop on the Red Tram.

See youat OSH!

Blue Skies,
Bob

We flew 34 kids at the June 13 rally. Thank you to our pilots and ground volunteers. It was a pleasant day with the temp in the mid-80s and a breeze. Please note: Our July 11 rally is planned for Warrenton-Fauquier Airport at 0900. This is a change from earlier plans.

Pilots: In an effort to push the total of Young Eagles flown to 2.5 million kids, EAA has announced Mission 2.5 where Young Eagle Pilots have an incentive to fly 25 kids between 10/1/2025 to 7/31/2026. Any volunteer pilot that rises to the challenge and flies 25 Young Eagles or more from October 1, 2025, through July 31, 2026, will be issued a limited-edition commemorative hat courtesy of Sporty’s.

Below are our current totals through June 13, 2026
for each Young Eagles pilot:
Chris Berg 21
Dan Botzer 32
Matthew Friedman 12
Joseph Fry 3
Dave Huss 3
Michael Iachini 8
Allan Osborn 27
Michael Osmers 6
Grant Peterson 4
Bob Prange 32
Brian Roy 17
Paul Schafer 13
Curtis Smith 17
Jeff Swedo 9
David Taylor 4

Our next Young Eagles Rallies are:
July 11 – Warrenton at 0900 – This is a
change!!!
August 8 – Manassas
Sept 12 – Manassas

Young Eagles flights are available to kids between ages 8 and 17. We normally hold our rallies on the second Saturday each month. Parents can register at eaachapters.org beginning at 8:00 AM on the 1st of each month.

Chapter 186 Young Eagles Coordinators
David Richards
Bob Prange

Planning to visit the DC Mall this summer for any of the sesquicentennial activities? Take a few minutes to get your space fix at the new display in the West Lobby of NASA Headquarters, just off 4th and E Streets, SW (Hidden Figures Way). It’s open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday. NASA is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States by featuring some of our aerospace accomplishments in a new public display. It wasn’t quite finished when I visited on Friday, 5 June 2026, but it should be fully open now.

The star of the display is a full-scale model of the Perseverance Mars rover, which landed (together with the Ingenuity helicopter!) on 18 February 2021, after launching on 30 July 2020. You get to walk all the way around the six-wheeled rover, roughly the size of an SUV, and admire its extended drill arm. Perseverance is making discoveries every day in the Jezero Crater on Mars.

Above the rover is the impressive silver ACS3, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. Launched into low Earth orbit as a small CubeSat on 23 April 2024, ACS3 successfully extended its long composite booms to unfurl its large, four-panel square sail to use the pressure of sunlight to propel the satellite through space. While this technology demonstration is taking place in low Earth orbit, the intent is to apply it to use for deep space exploration, using the solar wind in place of chemical propellants to accelerate probes to their targets. If you’re curious about it, check out the mission at https://www.nasa.gov/mission/acs3/, and learn how to #SpotTheSail in orbit! The lobby display uses flight spares of the long, lightweight composite booms used on the satellite in orbit.

The display also includes a replica of an Apollo A7L space suit, like the ones worn by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11; a small model of an RS-25 engine, the former Space Shuttle main engines now being expended to launch the SLS (Space Launch System) rockets sending Orion capsules into space on our Artemis missions to the Moon; a full fidelity fuel cell that was ready to fly on the Space Shuttle to combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity and water; and a small model of the Orion Launch Abort System (LAS), which would pull the Orion capsule and its astronauts off the SLS to safety if the rocket suffered a malfunction at launch or early in flight. A glass case contains assorted tools used during the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions, and another case contains the AVATAR flight hardware that just flew on the Artemis II mission to carry organ chips made from the human astronauts’ cells to facilitate the study of the effects of deep space radiation and microgravity on human health.

The Moon Room portion of the display wasn’t yet open when I visited, but the technicians doing the installation said it would include asteroid and moon rock samples. The art already up on the walls featured photographs from our Apollo Moon landing missions, including our “Moon buggy” lunar rovers. But the best part of the Moon display was already accessible in the lobby itself: a touchable Moon rock, inset into a glowing half- sphere! Unlike the touchable Moon rock at the National Air and Space Museum, this one isn’t flush with the display surface, but extends a bit above it, so you can appreciate its dimensions and feel a bit of the sides as well as the top. Yes, of course I took a Moon-touch selfie!

The one aeronautical achievement in the display is a full-scale mock-up of NASA’s small X 43A/ Hyper-X experimental hypersonic scramjet research aircraft, which successfully flew on 16 November 2004, reaching a top cruise speed of Mach 9.6 – almost 7,000 mph! A scramjet is an air -breathing engine in which the airflow through the engine remains supersonic, and the X-43A was the first scramjet ever operated in flight. Mounted on a Pegasus booster rocket, the X-43A was launched from NASA’s B-52B and ignited its scramjet engine after separating from the booster. You can watch footage of that flight here: https://www.youtube.com/watch v=anw1x9Ngjl0.

It’s a small display, but a fun visit. The NASA gift shop is also located in the West Lobby, so if you’re looking for some NASA merchandise, it’s a good stop. You can even buy coffee and donuts in the lobby; that wasn’t there before.

The spectacular NASA Earth Information Center display I wrote up a couple of years ago is still active in the East Lobby of the NASA HQ building, at the entry near 3rd Street, SW. You need to enter each lobby separately; the lobbies themselves are open to the public without restriction, but transiting through the building between them would require clearance through building security.

June 27 Member Gathering – 10:00 AM 

(Coffee and doughnuts at 9:20 AM)

This Saturday our speaker is our own Darrel Watson.  Darrel is an FAA Designated Airworthiness Representative (DAR) and has vast knowledge on the intricacies of FAA regs concerning certification of aircraft and pilots.  This month however he will be speaking to us about weather – where weather originates, how we take the collected data needed for forecasts, how we compile the data to be understood by layman and basically where does weather forecasting originate.  Weather information disseminated on our EFBs and .gov resources is changing rapidly.

Experimental Aircraft Association
Chapter 186
National Capital Chapter
10629 Aviator Ave.
Manassas, VA  20110

TONIGHT!!!   Tuesday June 23
IMC Club Meeting at 7:00 PM
VMC Club Meeting at 8:00 PM

You may not have received the FAASTeam notice yet but YES, we are conducting IMC Club and VMC Club meetings tonight.

Join us Tuesday night for one or both of our monthly safety meetings.  IMC Club and VMC Club meetings are usually on the fourth Tuesday of the month.
Attendees receive one FAA WINGS credit for each session.
Optional 5:30 PM dinner (Dutch treat) at Panera Bread on Bristow Center Drive.  Near the fountains visible from Route 28.

IMC Club meeting topic:
The IMC Club’s purpose is to promote instrument flying, proficiency, and safety. The intent is to create a community of pilots willing to share information, provide recognition, foster communications, promote safety, and build proficiency in instrument flying.

VMC Club meeting topic:
EAA/VMC Club provides organized “hangar flying” focused on building flying knowledge and skills.  This meeting offers an opportunity to share in-flight experiences and valuable safety tips.

EAA Chapter 186
10629 Aviator Avenue (was Observation Road)
Manassas, VA 20110

Do not park in the spaces marked “FAA.”  The first double row of spaces closest to the tower are faintly marked and are “tow-away” spaces.

The annual Women Can Fly event at Warrenton will be Saturday June 6. They usually fly over 150 people plus provide other educational activities. It is like a Young Eagles rally on steroids but for all ages. The name implies for women but that is not a hard and fast rule. Guys have been known to get a ride too. One of the educational activities is the Women Can Build station where participants learn the basics of measuring, filing, drilling, deburring and riveting, and end up building a cell phone charger/stand. Chapter 186 members are encouraged to help with this workstation. There will be a small assembly line that needs volunteers to keep the process moving. No aircraft building experience is required to help. This has been a very rewarding experience for those who helped in past years. While this is not a Chapter 186 event per se, it gives us visibility when our members are there helping the GA community show itself off to the public. If you are interested in helping, please let me know.

I’m in the process of renewing my CFI. Since I do not perform enough check ride recommendation signoffs in a two-year period I opt for taking an on-line refresher course. The aeronautical decision making chapter reminds me of the decision processes pilots go through, or should, and the various accidents we still see. The airlines, military and even GA/corporate fleet in a well-trained environment have it figured out. Where there is more than one pilot it should be a no-brainer on decision making. I learned from the good captains and practiced it myself ascaptain that anytime two (or more) of us had a different idea of the safe thing to do, we would default to the safer option. Now if a new co-pilot wants to divert to the alternate from the holding pattern at 14,000 pounds of fuel and I think 8,000 pounds is good enough, we may discuss it a bit and call it training. But if our decision fuel calculations are off one or two thousand pounds, we will go with the safer idea. When the monitoring pilot calls “go around” for an unstable approach or at DA with nothing in sight there should be no question, the airline requires the flying pilot to comply, not continue as though he/she knows better.

Unfortunately, I have seen accident reports lately where either the monitoring pilot did not speak up or the flying pilot ignored the call. In single-pilot flying it can be even less cut and dry. We make our decisions but there is no one next to us to remind us of our predetermined “bottom line” or our decision point. It is easy to creep past what we had previously decided was a good turn around point or safe fuel level or acceptable cloud level. How do we mitigate this as a single pilot? We need to continually check where we are and what we are doing against our predetermined bottom line. I am sure many of us have found ourselves a few minutes too far into deteriorating weather conditions where we end up turning back to an airport we had passed a few minutes ago when it was dry. Now you get to tie-down the plane and walk into the FBO in the rain. Or you go past your originally planned fuel stop and land with an acceptable amount of fuel but Or you go past your originally planned fuel stop and land with an acceptable amount of fuel but not enough to takeoff when you learn the fuel truck just ran out of fuel. At any moment we should be able to ask ourselves if we are sticking to the predetermined safety levels and decision points or, have we crept below those values? Try “talking” to the empty seat next to you as though there is another pilot with you. If you have a non-pilot passenger, tell them what you are doing/thinking along the way. It will help keep you honest. As a single pilot do we brief our IFR approach properly or do we just look at it and consider it briefed? If it is creepy talking when no one can hear you, at least consider briefing your approach silently but at a normal talking speed. You will be in a better position to fly the approach. If you don’t have the time to do that, you may already be in rush mode without realizing it. Rushing is necessary in very few situations and is often the culprit causing our bad decisions.

In the initial safety briefing (or the “here’s how we are going to operate” speech) to the rest of the flight deck crew, a good captain will always mention not only “if you are feeling rushed let me know” but also “if you think I am rushing but don’t know it, speak up and tell me.” As single pilots we don’t have anyone watching us. We must monitor ourselves. Enough rambling let’s go fly.

Blue Skies,
Bob

ONLINE APPLICATIONS
https://eaa186.org/events/eaa-chapter-186-
membership-online-application-2025/

CHAPTER MEMBERSHIP FEES
$30 Jan–Dec Single Member Dues
$35 Jan-Dec Family Member Dues
$15 for Name Tag and postage
$12 – hard copy of Directory (printing & mailing)
$2 surcharge if paying by PayPal

DID YOU CHANGE YOUR E-MAIL?
Please advise Meredith Martin-Richards at membership@186.org if any of your
membership directory information changes.
Thanks.