EAA Chapter 186

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

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We meet on the 4th Tuesday each month. IMC Club at 7 PM. VMC Club at 8 PM. Come for one or both sessions; we usually meet beforehand at 5:30 PM for informal dinner at the Panera Bread at Bristow Center.

The IMC Club’s purpose is to promote instrument flying proficiency, safety and education through a community of pilots sharing information and fostering communications. You don’t have to be instrument rated to come to the IMC Club. The VMC Club, for pilots wishing to improve their VFR flying proficiency, is modeled after the popular IMC Club providing organized “hangar flying” with a focus on VFR procedures, regulations and publications.

TR Proven and Chuck Kyle are our facilitators for these meetings but the attendees are encouraged to participate with their knowledge and experience. Each one-hour meeting earns you one credit toward the FAA Wings Pilot Proficiency program.

I got a behind-the-scenes hard hat tour of three of the five new galleries that will open on July 1, 2026, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space altitude and be slowed from much greater speed. And SpaceX has made those launches and returns a routine thing, with some boosters having flown over 30 times. (NASM has a multiple-flight Merlin engine and a grid fin from a Falcon 9 in the Futures in Space gallery.)

Living in the Space Age also includes the Structural Dynamic Test vehicle of the Hubble Space Telescope, which was there before, and the WWII Nazi German V-2 rocket that both the US and the USSR studied as the basis for launching their space programs. There’s a fascinating display on the development of the human-shaped spacecraft we call spacesuits. Our cultural fascination with space is represented by the large lit star that welcomed visitors to the Coney Island “Astroland” amusement park. A model GPS satellite helps illustrate how thorough space has been integrated into our daily lives, with all of us constantly located by our phones and smart watches equipped with GPS.

And everywhere in the gallery are the stories of people we’ve never seen who made it possible for the exploits of astronauts, space probes, and telescopes to dazzle us – the engineers, designers, crafters, physicians, technicians, and specialists in many fields who turned dreams into reality. I suspect meeting them may ignite the imaginations of kids and inspire new career choices.

How Things Fly will remind visitors of the old interactive gallery by the same name, but boy, is it ever an upgrade! This will be the favorite place of many visitors, with its hands-on approach to experimenting as a way of learning. It’s much bigger than the old gallery was, with two floors instead of one, and for the first time, it includes spaceflight as well as atmospheric flight; the whole east half of the gallery deals with space, while the west half is dedicated to flight in air. There’s a wind chamber people can walk into to experience how different wing forms – worn on their arms like sleeves – produce lift and drag. And for the first time in any museum, there’s going to be an actual supersonic wind tunnel visitors can activate to observe the shock waves that form as a craft flying faster than the speed of sound starts to compress the air ahead of it. That hadn’t yet been installed when I visited, and the museum staff have their fingers crossed that the sound dampening for that tunnel will work as well as promised, because the shrieking airspeed inside will hit over 700 mph!

I lost count of how many interactive elements there are in that gallery, but they include rockets you can launch to explore the relationship between mass and thrust, a quadcopter in a glass box you can try to control in flight, a model airplane with interchangeable parts you can try to balance as you change pieces, a balloon you can try to launch by heating the air inside it, and an actual Cessna 172 Skyhawk mounted with an aluminum bench seat for easy access that visitors can get inside. The AAR Design Hangar will let visitors experiment with designing and building prototypes to test possible solutions to design challenges. It’s going to be an irresistible place to play.

There will always be museum staff and educators inside this gallery to assist visitors and monitor the use of interactives. I don’t envy them that mission!

Unlike the old gallery, this one also includes museum artifacts that illustrate principles, so you won’t need to remember what to look for elsewhere in the museum to link to what you were learning here. They include engines; historic wind tunnel models; a full-scale model of the first craft to orbit Mars, Mariner 9; and a real WAC Corporal sounding rocket.

Finally, as in all the other galleries in our new museum, this one features the stories of individual people who contributed to designing and building airplanes and spacecraft, including engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. It’s a place where you can imagine yourself being part of the dream of flight.

Discovering Our Universe is the new astronomy gallery, and it’s a total departure from the chronological approach the old gallery took. If you remember that one – which I loved! – it began with the millennia of human development where humans had only their Mark One eyeballs to study the skies and start figuring out stars, planets, and the structure of the solar system, and then followed the progress made possible through successive inventions, from the optical telescope to the application of spectroscopy, to radio telescopes, space-based telescopes, and much more.

That history of the evolution of new tools broadening and changing our understanding of the universe is still there, but it’s not forced linear progression. You’ll walk into a gallery with a spiral of stars over your head, and the whole gallery itself has the feel of being a spiral galaxy with arms you want to explore. Where the previous gallery was closed in, with you walking a mostly chronological path until you got close to contemporary time, the new gallery feels more open and lets you go to whatever interests you. Looking up, you’ll see large circular screens defining different areas, and those areas can be used by educators to focus attention on topics. The artifacts in the gallery – many of which still need to be mounted! – include things from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) that detected the first gravitational wave from colliding black holes, the Event Horizon Telescope that captured the first photo of a black hole, and the DTM Spectrograph that provided Vera Rubin with evidence that dark matter exists. How we find exoplanets, how we determine distance in space, how we know how far back in time we’re looking – they’re all on display. You may not be able to do the math yourself, but you’ll learn about the people who did, and how they figured things out.

My favorite art piece from the earlier gallery – the bronze sculptural panel letting you both see and feel a depiction of the big bang and the early expansion of the universe – will be mounted in the new gallery, but it was still wrapped up, leaning against a case, when I visited. And that’s far from the only tactile display; throughout the gallery there are tactiles to translate what we’re used to thinking of as purely visual perception into something accessible by people with low or no vision. There’s going to be an audio navigation system for the gallery offering an overview, spotlighting artifacts, and providing directions for interactive elements; that’s still being developed.

And that’s where my preview tour ended. I did learn that Flight and the Arts will be a two-level gallery, with part given over to a dedicated one- year visiting exhibition and another section featuring part of the museum’s permanent collection. (Did you realize that NASM has the largest collection of aerospace-related art in the world?) The art gallery always did change more frequently than other galleries in the museum. And pro tip: if you’re looking for a quiet retreat, the art gallery has always been your best bet!

The last two galleries in the museum will open this fall. At Home In Space will open October 30, 2026, and feature the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle we needed to build it. I really can’t wait for that one, because humans living in space are my jam, and I’ve been teased with the news that the gallery will include an immersive, walk-through recreation of the ISS Destiny Module, the US National Laboratory in Space. Whee! It also looks toward future space stations and bases on other worlds. The final gallery, Modern Military Aviation, will open on Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2026, and that willcomplete the original museum footprint.

Construction is beginning on the Bezos Learning Center, immediately to the east of the museum, where the museum restaurant used to be. I’m told the Center will eventually include a restaurant for the museum, because our little Mars Cafe on the lower level really can’t accommodate the crowds of visitors we get, but I haven’t seen a timeline for it yet.

By the way – expect that free timed tickets will remain a requirement, although the number of tickets released each day is increasing as the accessible space within the museum grows with each new opening. Trust me, it’s a good idea: I remember all too well how jammed the museum got, especially in summer, when you couldn’t get close enough to exhibits to read signs! And I remember times we had to block access to the second floor, because the crowds were so big that we approached exceeding the weight the second floor could hold!

Make your plans for this summer and fall. See you at the museum!

These days, when we drive, we barely give a thought to figuring out how we’re going to get where we’re going; we just program our GPS. Some of us still like to have physical maps to back up the satellite navigation service, especially in remote areas with spotty service, but GPS has become our primary navigation aid. Pilots still need to give it more thought, but GPS entered their tool bag beginning in 1994 and has now become the dominant navigation aid.

Back in the early days of aviation, however, navigation was a huge challenge. There were no maps designed for pilots; the first airmail pilotsfollowed the “iron compass” – railroad tracks – to find their way from city to city. They could only fly during the day, because they needed light to seethe tracks. Even when the Army Air Service and the U.S. Geological Survey began creating “strip charts” in 1923 to plot airway routes between locations, including shortcuts over places rails and roads couldn’t go, pilots needed to be able to see the geographical features on the charts to be sure of where they were. For airmail to be a success for the U.S. Post Office, however, it had to be faster than trains to make the higher cost worthwhile – and trains could run at night. One experiment with bonfire beacons along a route between San Francisco and New York in 1921, with pilots equipped only with a railroad map and a compass, was enough to demonstrate that they wouldn’t be reliable, although one plane managed to complete the flight in 33 hours and 20 minutes, beating railroad time.

Serious experiments with small beacon lights in summer 1923 between Dayton and Columbus, OH succeeded in regular night runs, and a permanent chain of bigger lights was established in 1924 between Chicago, IL and Cheyenne, WY. By July 1925, light beacons defined an airway running between New York and Chicago. That success, and the passage of the Air Commerce Act in 1926, jump-started beacon construction, overseen by the Department of Commerce, and airmail airways began to crisscross the country with beacons on towers ten to fifteen miles apart, able to be seen for about forty miles in clear weather. The airway beacon system was at its peak from 1941 to 1946,with 2,112 beacons along 124 airways in the US.

Of course, the light beacons couldn’t reach through or above clouds, and radio-based navigation, developed during WWII (the VOR – Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range system), rendered the airway beacons obsolete. The US Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA, forerunner of today’s FAA) began to deploy VOR in 1949, and as the VOR network developed and spread through the 1950’s and 1960’s, the old airway beacons began to be decommissioned. Airports still have beacons to provide visual identification of the airport to pilots at night, but the very last federal airway beacon shut down in 1972. With the rise of GPS, the VOR system itself is being cut back simply to provide a conventional backup navigation service in case of GPS outages technology marches on and history rhymes.

So why am I talking about a system that no longer exists? Because a piece of that crucial aviation history unexpectedly turned up at Warrenton- Fauquier Airport and has now been transformed into a marvelous historic exhibit in the terminal building, dedicated on April 25, 2026!

Warrenton-Fauquier Airport didn’t exist during the heyday of the beacons, so it wasn’t a stop on the airway beacon system. It began as a little grass strip in the 1960’s, got popular, expanded and got paved, and was purchased by Fauquier County in the late 1990’s to be operated by the county government. Along the way, it acquired a second- hand beacon light to use as its identifier. That rotating white and green light served until 2013, when the FAAjupgraded all airports to LED lights.

When the folks at Warrenton took down the old beacon – thankfully with great care – they discovered it bore a Department of Commerce Airways emblem, signifying it had once been part of that historic airway beacon system. The Warrenton Booster Club, with the help of volunteers and donors, undertook the restoration of the beacon. They still don’t know where it had been positioned back in the day, but the research continues; I’m hoping they can trace its full provenance and fill in the blanks!

So, the next time you’re at Warrenton – say, at an upcoming Young Eagles rally – check out the lovely new display and read all about the beautifully restored beacon. It shines a light on our
aviation past!

Are you jonesing for the power and grace of a B-17? Do you want to marvel at a twin-engine WWII B-25 bomber being louder on board than a four-engine B-17? I have good news for you! No, our beautiful B-17 Aluminum Overcast isn’t coming; she’s still down for more repair work. And EAA’s B-25 Berlin Express is staying close to home in Wisconsin and Illinois this summer. But the Commemorative Air Force’s Airbase Arizona is bringing their “Flying Legends of Victory” tour to Warrenton-Fauquier Airport June 9-14, 2026, featuring rides and ground tours on their lovely B-17G Sentimental Journey and B-25J Maid in the Shade. If you want to book rides or learn more about their schedule on site, their website is live here: https://www.azcaf.org/location/warrenton-va-tour-stop/.

For even more fun, the airport will be hosting the Sentimental Journey Dance on Saturday, June 13, 2026, from 7:00 to 9:30 PM at the terminal. Dress in your best vintage attire and enjoy live period music by the 17-piece Silver Tones Swing Band and their Andrews Sisters style vocalists, the Silver Belles. The event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be available for a donation. Check out the event here: https://www.fauquiercounty.gov/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/68972/.

Should I start singing “I’ll Be Seeing You” there?

We have chosen Rori Ross as our Ch 186 Ray Scholar for 2026 and EAA recently approved our selection. Rori has been on several Young Eagles flights and has been volunteering on the ground crew at our Young Eagles rallies. She soloed at the USAF Aim High Academy, a three week introductory flight academy. Rori is now taking flight instruction at Elevation Aviation on the east side of the field at Manassas. She will graduate this June and plans to attend Oklahoma State University’s aviation program.

The Ray Scholarship pays $12,000 toward the flight training costs of obtaining a Private Pilot Certificate. Note that total costs will most likely exceed $12,000. It is funded in three installments: $4,800 up front, $4,800 after first solo and $2,400 after written exam completion. The required milestones are:

• First solo flight within three months,
• Pass the private pilot written exam within six
• months,
• Pass the Private Pilot check ride within one year of receiving the initial funds. The EAA asks for two hours per month of volunteer time at the chapter during training.

Possession of an FAA medical certificate is required for scholarship consideration. It does not suffice to merely plan to get an FAA Medical if chosen as a scholar. EAA will not allow us to put forth a scholar for their consideration if he/she does not already have a medical (minimum of a FAA Third Class certificate).

For the 2026 Air Academy we have spent our credits available to help with the tuition for two campers that are going in June and July. One is going to the Explore Camp Session 1 in late June and one is going to Session 2 in early July.

The EAA Air Academy offers away-from-home aviation themed camps. For 2026 there were two separate camps: Explore Aviation Camp and Navigating Horizons Camp for either of two age groups, 14 to 15 and 16 to 18. The information (dates, course content, ages, tuition costs) for the 2026 camps is available at https://www.eaa.org/eaa/youth/eaa-aviation-and-flight-summer-camps and the info for the 2027 camps and on-line registration will be posted there in September 2026. Parents: Info for the 2027 camps and on-line registration will be posted there in September 2026. Camper slots fill up quickly! Once
registered and accepted for a camp, you can apply directly to the EAA for an EAA campership which may help pay for the tuition. EAA Ch 186 has also tuition assistance in the past couple years. If you are already registered for an Air Academy camp, let us know and we may be able to help with tuition assistance. Transportation to and from Air Academy is the responsibility of the parents. Room and board are included in the tuition.

The May 9 Young Eagles rally at Warrenton Airport was canceled. We had 30 kids plus 15 on the waitlist but the pilot/aircraft list shrank in the days leading up to the event to the point that we could not have held a successful rally.

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 May 2026 for
each Young Eagles pilot:

Chris Berg 12

Dan Botzer 26

Matthew Friedman 8

Joseph Fry 3

Dave Huss 3

Michael Iachini 8

Allan Osborn 20

Michael Osmers 6

Grant Peterson 2

Bob Prange 32

Brian Roy 17

Paul Schafer 13

Curtis Smith 11

Jeff Swedo 9

David Taylor 4

Our next Young Eagles Rallies are:
June 13 – Manassas at 0900
July 11 – Manassas at 0900
August 22 – Manassas at 0900

Young Eagles flights are available for 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