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July 8, 2009

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Due to the factors which are inherent in this type of experience, apologies are in order to the followers of our testing session. As some of you may have noticed, an update was skipped yesterday, so two updates will be posted today in order to catch you up to our current situation. With so much activity ocurring, time did not allow for the posting.

The crew woke up to a beautiful sunrise and began the day by gulping down a cup of coffee, putting on work clothes and gathered around the car in the shelter like a hive of bees. With the course that had been run on the previous day being too rough, Ed decided to try to desert highway nearby as an alternative. The repeated travel of vehicles over this course across the playa had created a hard packed ribbon that was better than what was available everywhere else in the area.

A morning run to the north was conducted after a period of vehicle preparation for the purpose of seeing if this course would provide an improved surface. After running the car, Ed stated that, while the surface was better for its compactness, there still was at least one soft spot which caused his steering to deviate from the course temporarily, but recovered easily using a combination of front wheel correction with an independent right rear wheel magnetic braking application.

One of the newest members of our always growing team of support is Shauna Hannum; our female firefighter/EMT specialist. Mother of three daughters, Shauna met Tom Pengelley - one of the two team truck drivers - a few months ago and learned from him about his involvement in the NAE™ project. Interested in what this was all about, she joined him at a few of the weekend work parties. It didn't take long to get hooked on the goal of our vision to break the existing land speed record, and she made the effort to join us at our test session by participating with the fire safety team of Sean Rondestvedt, Rob Martinson & Eric Helpenstell. She trained as a firefighter at the North County fire station in Stanwood, WA and is current pursuing her Fire One at Silvana in Dist. 19. She is also currently taking courses in Criminal Justice online at Everest.

Tomorrow: Thursday the team will move its run course to the north area of Black Rock where its surface has been discovered to much improved over the sourthern area after input from Eric Helpenstell who is very familiar with the playa's conditions. So, be sure to check back for more news on our test session tomorrow.

On Television

We continue to talk with a half dozen television production companies interested in doing a documentary on our upcoming test session.

The North American Eagle™ has been featured in over eight television shows and every major television network. Recently NBC / Universal filmed the team for a possible pilot.

On the Newsstands

This week the project made the front cover of Desktop Engineering magazine. You can read the David Cohn story describing the engineering behind the Eagle, and some of the people who make it happen.

On the newsstands is an article on the project in the June 2009 issue of FLY RC magazine. The very popular magazine can be found at most grocery stores and all book stores.

We know a lot of our fans are on facebook. Now the North American Eagle™ is on facebook! In fact many of our team members are also! It is just another great way to let everyone know what we're up to. We have many of our latest Power-On systems test videos up on the site. Just type in North American Eagle and you will find us! Tell your friends! It's fun!

We invite you to add a comment, or remark, about our program or the site.

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