BelgianAviationNews

2013-10-31

BAPA Belgian Aviation Preservation Association Newsletter October 2013

*	* October 2013
	10 ! Last October 14th, the 10th aircraft joined the BAPA in Gembloux. This is a magnificent Austria Glider offered to us by Willy Marrot thanks to the help of Bob. After the arrival of the machine, she was quickly cleaned by the enthusiastic team. This is not the only news at our workshop. Eric put on display USAAF pilot equipment near the P-38 display. Our future visitors will have so the possibility to learn about flight gears. Laurent continue to work on his front undercarriage but now he can simulate retraction and extension of the device. This is the first time in many years of active restoration we make an aeronautical device back in functional state. Unusually, we restored parts for static display only. This achievement was completed in just 3 months. Yves and Thierry started to work on the front fuselage. Taking advantage of their long experience, they first concentrate on the documentation. Thierry setup a professional logbook of all the operations performed on the airframe. They started to work on the airframe but any task if first carefully planned to cope with the manuals. Eric also dismantled damaged parts on the central section of the wings to secure future operations and study what need to be done for repairs. It was a long and painstaking task. Thanks to the results of the inauguration party (Thanks again Alex) . We started to buy the missing equipment for our restorations. A dummy for Eric USAAF flight gear and others first necessity tools were purchased hunting the internet to find the best cost effective solutions. We are still looking for some missing tools, if ever you can help please find the list of what we search at http://www.bapa.be/how-to-help-us All together we cumulated much more than 100 years of experience. In this long time, we succeed in avoiding accidents during our restoration activities. Safety is for us mandatory and critical. Aviation and specially the Belgian Air Force has a very long tradition of promoting safety by the use of posters. We will use vintage safety poster at the workshop as a reminder of good practices and put a copy of these posters at http://www.bapa.be/safety On the archiving from, we restarted to publish the already scanned documents of the Veys collection. More than 140 documents are now available at http://www.bapa.be/our-projects/07-collection-michel-veys Our collection of digital aircraft manuals is now of 808 items (https://sites.google.com/site/bapabe2/our-projects/archives) . Robert provided to us some extra cabinets very helpful to store the documents we collected or we received. André Dillien offered to us his Belgian registration files. The last update is available from www.bapa.be Thanks again to all those we support us. Our finance status is healthy for the end of this year but we need to increase our capabilities in 2014. Any support, financial as well in gift of tools, archive or aircraft is still welcome. See more at http://www.bapa.be/how-to-help-us Many happy landings All pictures available from our picture album
*	Visit us on www.bapa.be To join the Bastards : +32 477931671 or +32 48536686 Email : contact@bapa.be Who is the BAPA ? see http://www.bapa.be/about-our-organization Help us ? see : http://www.bapa.be/how-to-help-us We do it because we did not know it is supposed to be impossible