Hangar Debrief
Working on the panel of his RV-7 caused Rick to reminisce about the development of various avionics.
Persevering on
Our Projects
And reminiscing about GA advances
By Rick Weiss
The weather for the past week has been more like
spring than winter here in Central Florida, so I have
not been suffering from the "dark ages," that period of
time when winter weather keeps me from working on
my aircraft projects. It's been warm and beautiful, so it
was out to the hangar to continue working on my RV.
For me, the instrument panel is one of the more exciting parts of the building process. It's an opportunity
to be creative, and it brings the experimental part
of building more into play. My panel design is set in
aluminum, but where in the fuselage do you place all
those boxes that make the magic work? That part is
easy if you don't care about having access to them
later when the fuselage skin is on and you can't reach
in to repair something. I spent a large amount of time
trying to figure out where to place the XM weather
box. So much time, in fact, that my mind started wandering to the past.
Let's go back to the early 1980s. Imagine, if you will,
having a weather radar picture in front of you in
your small GA airplane. Most of us remember when
that would have required an onboard weather radar
system, which would have cost more than our entire
homebuilt aircraft. In the early 1980s, I was working in
the cockpit technology office of the FAA when a MITRE Corporation engineer designed a system that took
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