The IMC Club and VMC Club Pilot Safety meetings are cancelled for tonight, Jan 27. The passageway to the Chapter House is not safe due to the icy conditions.
The next meetings will be the fourth Tuesday of the month…
Tuesday February 24
7:00 PM IMC Club
8:00 PM VMC Club
Saturday January 24 Member Gathering – 10:00 AM, with coffee and donuts at 9:20 AM
Our guest speaker Saturday will be Doug “Smash” Yurovich, Col, USMC (ret), former F-18 Pilot and Co-Founder and Chief Instructor at Piston2Jet Flight School.
“Smash” has flight experience in over 70 types of aircraft, including the F-4 Phantom, F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet, and the AV-8 Harrier. He served as a US Navy, Marine Corps Detachment, Test Pilot at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station and has the distinct honor of being the first ever Marine to command a US Navy Carrier Air Wing. At Piston2Jet Smash serves as Safety Director creating, managing, and improving safety-of-flight guidelines and procedures. He’s a distinguished member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and is the Chief Test Pilot at Piston2Jet.
Gathering starts at 10:00 AM with coffee and doughnuts at 9:20 AM.
Membership: We are in the 2026 membership renewal process. If you have not renewed yet please mail or bring the attached renewal form to the meeting. We also have renewal forms at the Chapter House. You can pay by check or Zelle or PayPal.
Park in the lot by the Control Tower but do not park in the faintly marked “FAA” spaces. Walk through the pedestrian gate toward the EAA186 sign.
We had a great turnout for the Chapter Holiday party and once again there was plenty of food and great conversation. Barry and Ann Toole came a few hours early to cook the turkey on the grill and Danny and Didi brought a ham. The side dishes and desserts were amazing. This annual event also gives us the opportunity to award the George Lutz Award to a deserving Chapter 186 member.
George W. Lutz’s love of aviation inspired him to dedicate his time and efforts to improving safety, education, and the enjoyment of general aviation through his work with the FAA, Experimental Aircraft Association, and the Quantico Marine Corps Flying Club.
Before all this, during his 25-year career in the Air Force he received a master’s degree in engineering administration at George Washington University, served as a B-47 test pilot, held several staff assignments at the Pentagon and Andrews AFB, and was base commander at Nakon Phanom Airbase in Thailand,in 1970/1971. He retired from the Air Force with the rank of Colonel in 1972.
This year’s George Lutz Award recipient is Chris Berg. Chris is a Lifetime member of the EAA and was Secretary of Chapter 186 for several years. He earned his Private Pilot Certificate 35 years ago, joined the EAA the same year and began giving YE rides when the program began 32 years ago. He has flown 412 YEs and was recognized last year for being one of Virginia’s Top Eagles by the Virginia Department of Aviation. He was an engineer in the Air Force and retired after 24 years in 2014 and is still working full time. His Father introduced him to airplanes when he was young, and he attended Oshkosh with his father and has missed only a few years since. He has owned his Cessna Cardinal for 20 years and has flown across the country twice while relocating with the military. He flies into AirVenture every year with Cessnas to Oshkosh.
Chris is building a Van’s RV-10 in his basement workshop. Chris’ experience in the role of Board Member and Secretary is still valuable and his advice and ideas are always welcome. Congratulations Chris, we appreciate your dedication to aviation, EAA and Chapter 186.
In addition to the George Lutz Award and the EAA provided certificates for the Officer and Board positions, we awarded the following members in appreciation of their volunteerism:
Young Eagles Pilot of the Year – Brian Roy
Brian is a regular volunteer pilot at our Young Eagles Rallies and also often presents subject matter content for our monthly IMC Club pilot safety meetings. He shows professionalism in flight planning and decision-making and best of all helps us improve our flying skills in his presentations on his flying experiences.
Young Eagles Crewmember of the Year – John Storey
Our ground and admin volunteers keep our events running smoothly; John has helped at numerous rallies, always lending a hand, always willing to do more; the best part is his son beat him by a year getting a plaque last year! (Son Cliff was last year’s Junior Volunteer of the year).
Ch 186 Volunteer of the Year – Sam Bingham
Sam is seen helping in numerous areas as photographer, Young Eagles ground crew or admin and IT wizard. He keeps our computers, tablets, simulators, software, LiveATC and wi-fi working. He also helps plan and set up our movie nights. He has been known to stop by the CH on the way to/from work to fix errant electrons.
In Appreciation – Cathy Carey
In addition to being our Sunshine Coordinator, Cathy helped coordinate merchandise orders, helped with every event and made the prizes for the Chili Cook-off. She managed our biggest Chapter 186 fund-raiser of the year, the Culpeper AirFest in October.
Junior Volunteer of the Year – Rori Ross
Ch 186 is involved with many things…Building, flying, fixing planes, giving safety seminars, cook trailer events, flying YEs; it is all rewarding but one of the best rewards is seeing the young adults getting more involved. Sometimes you can tell they just want more of this aviation thing…Rori is eager to learn, volunteers at YE rallies and continues to show her enthusiasm for aviation.
Membership: The 2026 membership renewal process has begun! You should have received a membership form for your 2026 dues in the mail. Please use that form or fill in the enclosed membership form and either mail it with a check or if you prefer, pay with Zelle or PayPal using the payee as indicated on the renewal form and mail or bring the form to the next meeting. Membership dues are the primary means of funding our
existence.
Airport Operations Follow-Up: Airport Operations Manager, Richard Allabaugh, has provided the following answers to questions at his
Nov 22 presentation:
-Can the new gates open/close faster? We will adjust the closure time once people become acclimated, it is currently at 10 sec. The actual speed at which the gate opens and closes is not adjustable.
-Regarding badging in and out: The scenario asked, “If I were to enter the airport, then take a flight somewhere in my airplane, but had to drive back to the airport or rent a car, would the system prevent me from entering the airport because it didn’t detect my swipe out?” Swipe is a swipe, doesn’t matter which side, but passing a card through the fence so someone else can enter is prohibited. If the individual fails to swipe out, they will not be prevented from re-entering.
-Gates EV-03 | EV-04 don’t detect motorcycles. Is this going to be fixed? EV-3 will be taken out of service in December.
–“When the west vehicle gate fails again…it’s not a matter of if, but when, do we still continue to use Gate D and drive on the interior service road, or is there a plan for an alternate gate to enter/exit?” “I was told in my training to never use the interior service road, so you would have to understand my hesitance to use that gate and road.” I would expect an impact from an inattentive driver rather than an outright failure of the gate. IF the gate goes out of service, we will be reusing Gate D. There is no plan, at the moment, on a second vehicular entrance/exit, but security is planning on a northern pedestrian gate. The development on the northwest side of the airport might yield additional gate opportunities, but this is uncertain until we see the plans.
-My card just got renewed but shows it expiring in 3 months. Am I going to have to pay for another card after just renewing it? Yes, all cards applied for after December 1st will have the $25 fee associated with them. Cards will expire annually on the cardholder’s birthday.
EAA Survey: EAA is conducting a survey of its membership about local chapters. We encourage you to participate in this survey. EAA will share the results of Chapter 186 members’ responses with us to help us better understand our areas of strength and areas that need improvement. Results will be de-identified. We will not see individual member information or responses. If enough Chapter 186 members respond, we will get credit toward the ten criteria for maintaining our Gold Chapter status. If the link does not work, please copy and paste to your browser. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZW9WXBL
Blue Skies,
Bob
January 24 Member Gathering – 10:00 AM
Our guest speaker will be Doug “Smash” Yurovich former F-18 Pilot and Co-Founder and Chief Instructor at Piston2Jet Flight School.
Our monthly member gatherings are normally held on the fourth Saturday of the month at 10:00 AM with coffee and doughnuts at 9:20 AM. Exceptions are the October Chili Cook-Off and the December Holiday Party.
The 2026 membership renewal process has begun! You should have received a membership form for your 2026 dues in the mail. Please use that form or fill in the enclosed membership form and either mail it with a check or if you prefer, pay with Zelle or PayPal using the payee as indicated on the renewal form and mail or bring the form to the next meeting. Membership dues are the primary means of funding our existence.
ONLINE APPLICATIONS
https://eaa186.org/events/eaa-chapter-186-membership-online-application-2025/
NAME TAG
https://nds.qgi.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Name-Tag-Order-Form-.pdf
CHAPTER MEMBERSHIP FEES
$30 Jan–Dec Single Member Dues
$35 Jan-Dec Family Member Dues
$12 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 meredithm.m7@gmail.com or 703-594-1281 if any of your membership directory information changes. Thanks.
EAA Air Academy 2026 Registration Parents: Information (dates, course content, ages, tuition costs) and on-line registration for the June and July 2026 camps are available at https://www.eaa.org/eaa/youth/eaa-aviation-and-flight- summer-camps. There are two separate camps:
Explore Aviation Camp and Navigating Horizons Camp for either of two age groups, 14 to 15 and 16 to 18. Once you are 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 provided 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. If you are in either age group and interested in Explore Aviation Camp let us know. We have placed deposits on a couple camp sessions for campers to be named later. We may be able to help with up to 50% of your tuition. Transportation to and from Air Academy is the responsibility of the parents but room and board are all part of the tuition.
Ray Scholarship
In January 2026 Chapter 186 will apply to EAA to administer a 2026 Ray Foundation Aviation Scholarship. If we are selected to give another Ray Scholarship, we will begin a search in March for a motivated youth aged 161⁄2 to 19 who would like to participate in a concentrated one-year effort to acquire his/her Private Pilot License. Thank you to all the volunteers that keep this Chapter busy and visible. That helps us qualify to grant another Ray Scholarship each year.
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.
We flew 38 kids in November and 35 in December at Manassas. Our 2023 Ray Scholar Grant Peterson paid it back and flew his first Young Eagle in his own CH2000! 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 12-13-2025 for each Young Eagles pilot:
Chris Berg 9
Dan Botzer 26
Matthew Friedman 4
Joseph Fry 3
Michael Iachini 8
Allan Osborn 12
Grant Peterson 2
Bob Prange 23
Brian Roy 17
Paul Schafer 6
David Taylor 4
Our next Young Eagles Rallies are:
Jan 10 – Manassas at 1100 – Cancelled
Feb 14 – Manassas at 1100
Mar 14 – Manassas at 1100
Young Eagles flights are available for kids between ages 8 and 17. We normally hold our rallies on the second Saturday each month. Please note we are now using an 11:00 AM starting time for the winter months. 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
Hello again, EAA 186!
Last I wrote to you, I was alternating cooking in the Pawnee cockpit and backflipping gliders over the Arizona desert. This was in my effort to collect a daunting 1,500 hours of total time in order to qualify for an Airline Transport Pilot certificate.
During this chase, I had applied to every “cadet program” associated with any airline that had a place to slide an application through the mailbox attached to or not. Through my tour of each application process, I learned that some airlines in 2023 were serious about handing out interviews, some were interested but overwhelmed by industry changes, and the rest either did not care or were outright rude. Frontier only accepted applications from instructors who were graduates of ATP Flight School—good luck with a completely isolated labor base, I suppose. SkyWest made you one of their cadets if you gave them your email, but their interview was “worse than an instrument and commercial checkride combined” and they would tell you they “weren’t really looking for anyone that was not outright impressive” shortly before it. Spirit was utterly faking their process and a short while later surfaced the issue of all now-known-about. Envoy could not give out class dates on time, and PSA’s team went unresponsive for long enough that their cadets just started leaving for other airlines. Those PSA cadets couldn’t even figure out how to return their bonuses. Southwest cadets have it possibly the worst; a 737 SIC rating guaranteed to each one of them, but no timeline to be found… after paying Southwest themselves for $100,000 of training at their “225” program.
Republic liked me but sentenced their entire future pilot base to a five-year commitment with shaky promises shortly after my successful cadet interview. Piedmont, initially unresponsive to applications for months at a time, would at least answer emails and let you know they were working on things.
I intended to win the Piedmont Airlines slot. I favored their routes all over my East Coast homeland and their old hardware, the Embraer 145. Additionally, I wanted to be part of a smaller company. With 800–1000 pilots at the time, PDT was perfect. I submitted my application to their CJO program the day I hit 400 hours total time, the bare minimum one was allowed to apply, which would turn out to be the best decision of my life. Six months after applying to Piedmont, they shot me an email while I was in a thermal over AZ Route 238. I cheered at its contents—an interview offer.
Intense studying of the interview recounts on the aviation interview websites prepared me quite well for the early interview. At 750 hours, as a CFI-G and multi-engine commercial pilot only, they offered me a conditional job offer to be a First Officer on the E145. I was in total disbelief.
Now, even if you bend a couple rules, it’s quite difficult to finish up 100 hours of night flying in gliders. The required 75 hours of instrument time would be both illegal AND impressive. I did some math and realized I had to collect these hours elsewhere, and that I sure couldn’t pay for them out of pocket.
Luckily, I had completed my CFI-Airplane Single Engine Land on my own during the glider teaching and towing. This was mostly to be legally able to teach my friends but ended up being quite necessary to secure a job instructing with the University of North Dakota. One might think I would have needed to exchange my desert-approved short-shorts for long johns during this frigid four-year span north of my dried-out carcass, but that was not the case. UND opened shop outside of the former military base at KIWA, Mesa-Gateway several years prior.
This is where they seem to do much of their business and must be confusing for the public. UND handles their own for-profit aviation instruction, that of local community colleges, military contracts, and a few international partnerships. Each of these student bases varied wildly in student quality and capability. There were seldom days that bored me.
The community college students could only fly three or so times per week and you had to build your schedule around them entirely. The fight to keep them not only proficient, but learning was intense and only the strongest survived while doing their degree.
The international partnerships—groups of entirely Chinese men—had been ordered by their government to succeed or be sent home as a ground handler for the rest of their lives. This was not a joke, and we were briefed on this during our instructor indoctrination. Our UND superiors phrased our part in the system as “giving these men an opportunity to bring themselves and their families out of possible poverty.” While I disagreed with giving away our skills and knowledge to the Chinese citizenry, this phrasing caused me to sympathize for them in a new way.
I became one of the few whom they would all collectively greet excitedly in passing. They were quite jovial despite the stakes and would share their culture readily. Some would even discreetly acknowledge and discuss parts of CCP history that we Americans struggled to understand. I only had to sign off on sending home one failure. The rest were all quite quick with ground material and would slowly, but surely, all be tuned up to the minimum American standards.
UND’s for-profit, non-degree associate program is called “Fast Track.” The initial (private pilot) stage of this training is brutal and expensive for those who subscribe to sunk-cost methodology. I witnessed both the peak and the body-shuddering murk of aviation learning there. After $30,000 of unsuccessful pre-solo instruction, the way out is no longer through, and that money will not be made back as a paid pilot. This murk is where I spent most of my time operating with UND. To this day, I wish certain final decisions were made earlier for several men.
My favorite group of students were the Air Force airmen. They were required to wear a green flight suit even in 110-degree flying conditions, but were always joking, relatable, and hard workers. They studied what you asked them every night and brought it readily into the cockpit the next day. Nine operations in seven days and honorable effort was the standard.
I spent every day of every week, from before sunrise to well past sunset, drawing on whiteboards, throttling up into thermal desert air, and evaluating maneuvers. I was paid $18 per hour for Hobbs time only. My cohorts and I even stopped billing most of the time for ground so we could fly more the restrictive 40 weekly hours UND limited us to.
I was tired, but truly happy.
I and the other hundred or so instructors bobbed and weaved all over the American Southwest in the heat and cold, joking with each other over the radio and waggling wings, surviving whatever our students could throw at us. It was every day, it was brutal, and it was victorious. I had no hobbies. I had no money. I just had those instructors and our students.
I also acquired my CFI Instrument Airplane at UND and realized just how boring flying straight and level was. We had to do an end-of-course presentation for the silly little ground school attached to the CFI program, and I made it stand-up comedy performance. It became another “core memory” as we all did four or five instrument lessons for students and then requested my chief pilot to never make me do them again.
I realized that the only fixed-wing instructor certificate I was missing was my multi-engine ticket (MEI). Many of my coworkers were acquiring it to stand out amongst other applicants as the airlines’ standards tightened ever faster. The post-Covid boom was beginning to end, and I was constantly asked how I had won my slot with Piedmont. “Well, I applied the day I hit 400 hours…” This was never a satisfactory answer.
Not having my MEI primarily stood in the way of teaching multi-engine tailwheel WWII bombers or Beech 18s escape my future. I knew I would probably never be as current in general aviation as I was then, and so I called every outfit in Arizona and every pilot examiner (DPE) I knew. Lo and behold, none of the latter would pick up the phone, so none of the former would take me. Not even my employer, UND, had a solution.
One day, after I had resigned my search, an outfit in Glendale, Arizona called me up. They offered a slot the week after next. I practically had to make the decision right there on the spot.
I don’t think I had ever studied for a checkride the way I studied for my MEI. I showed up and scared their instructors, bringing my notebooks pre-filled with absolutely everything I could glean from their prep documents. I chair-flew the checkride every day, stressing every change I wanted to make in vivid color memory. Each chair flight took a full hour. You should have seen my face when my MEI instructor played dumb and turned off the only working magnetos during an engine restart at 6,000 feet. That was the heaviest glider I ever flew, for the five seconds it took me to slap them back on. My kneepad received, “Watch mags close during OEI.”
The checkride was two halves, but not the way one normally thinks. Half was the oral and flight. The other half was a discussion with the examiner about how this certificate was the dangerous one that I would ever acquire. I informed him I was exactly aware; I had heard the final pleading radio calls from a twin that went down during a minimum control speed demo due to an unrecoverable mistake. It was then that I vowed to show up to every light multi-engine flight armed with utter discipline and a gritty jaw. The examiner, a friendly associate of mine, had the same memories in his eyes. I passed the ride without issue.
In the final hundred or so hours headed to 1,500, flying began to slow for the Arizona summer again. I and a few fellow instructors teamed up and decided to throw whatever money we could muster into our final GA flight hours. We were going to training that year, and no later.
I believe these hundred hours were the absolute most dangerous flying I did in my career. I had real mechanical failures before this time, real weather incidents, but the planes we flew and the places we flew to have their own tricks in store. We were, of course, paying bottom dollar for the cheapest planes we could locate in the desert. Ernest Gann would smile.
But I made it through those 1,500 hours of general aviation. I still get to fly a duster for fun, towing gliders up as a volunteer, and occasionally teaching soaring from the back seat. I also still envision a hangar with a Stearman for instruction and couches for beer-sipping in the near future.
For work, I fly for Piedmont as part of the American Airlines group. I wear an American uniform, wrestle an American flag on the vertical to the ground day and night, and throw booming thrust reversers out in swirling snow and rain.
It has been quite the ride so far. From the flight levels,
Former Ray Scholar and Proud EAA member
Tony Crupi
