Eagle's Lair
Members Roster

June 1, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Team North American Eagle™ is pleased to announce a partnership with Thomas Aerospace. Their mission statement is: Innovative Technology from the Last Frontier. Located in Fairbanks Alaska, Thomas Aerospace is building our high speed parachute and deployment bag system.

Dr Dave Thomas and Ed Shadle inspect the new Thomas Aerospace Parachutes

Thomas Aerospace is an innovative high technology company specializing in aerospace systems design, consulting, prototyping, flight testing and flight instruction. Randy and his brother Dr Dave Thomas head up Thomas Aerospace. Dr Thomas is also a technical consultant on Team NAE™.

Working in conjunction with the Eagle's deceleration team led by John Winchester, Ed Shadle design the actuating system and Eric McClain fabricated the stainless steel parachute tube. The system will be deployed at speeds near 800 mph. The dynamic pressure, or what physicist describe with the letter Q (or the small letter q) is over 1661 lb of pressure per square foot. Routine parachute deployment at these speeds has never been attempted in a civilian application. Thomas Aerospace offer the following services:

- Aerospace systems design, consulting and prototyping
- Landing drag chute systems for very light jets
- Aerial photography and surveillance
- High altitude flight testing
- Special R & D flight testing
- High altitude/high speed drop testing
- Flight Instruction

Testing of our new Thomas Aerospace parachutes will be done at our June '08 test session at El Mirage Dry Lake Bed in California.

The team will utilize Olympus i-SPEED HG cameras to film the parachute deployment with up to 33,000 FPS (frames per second). These high FPS will allow the engineers to slow down the one second parachute opening sequence to analyze the event.

Additional video is captured by Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation RocketCam™. These are the same units used on the Space Shuttle and Delta Heavy rocket delivery platforms.

For more information contact:

Thomas Aerospace
P.O. Box 84328
Fairbanks, Alaska 99708

Phone: 907-452-4883

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