Eagle's Lair
Members Roster

May 24, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It was another beautiful day in Spanaway on this Memorial Day Weekend.

Although Saturdays are the focus of activities in our weekly updates, a lot of work from people - some who are team members and others who are not - all over the United States and Canada is taking place regularly during the week.

In Bothell, Washington, at McVay’s Mobile Welding, Bernard McVay and his crew worked on two new AFFF Fire Fighting Systems and made good progress.  The 125 gallon units can lay down nearly five minutes of fire retardant foam.  When added to the North American Eagle™ inventory we will now have three complete units placed strategically along the 13 mile run at Black Rock.  Special thanks to Jason Rhodes at Alternative Blasters Corporation  in Marysville, WA, for stripping the pressure vessels with their sand blasting equipment in preparation for new paint.  We would also like to thank Shad McVay and Ramine from McVay Welding for all the plumbing and welding fabrication.

Steve Green, in Abbottsford, BC, is working on a new cradle for our McVay Mobilizer.  The unit will be made of an industrial plastic that will not only hold the front wheel on the mobilizer, but protect it from being damaged during transport.

Present at today’s work party were Ed Shadle, Keith Zanghi, Jon Higley, Bill Eckberg, Eric Helpenstell, Omar Chramosta, John Winchester, Rex Walter and Mike Thoe.

Some more visitors came by the hangar to view the car and get their picture taken with the NAE™. Travis Teddy and his two sons; Nick & Jordan, along with Brad Adams and his brother Jim with his daughter Lexie. Dropping by later were Perri, from Elite Automotive with his wife and children.

Mike and Rex gave the rest of the team a progress report on getting the CFD work for the car done. If things go along as expected, this work should be completed within a month or two.

Photo credits - Travis Teddy

While Bill continued finishing work on the windshield, today's main task was the testing of the high speed parachute deployment system. The entire weekend crew traveled to Spanaway Airport to functional test our high speed parachute system.  Mounted on our aeronautical test bed, the team lifted the unit into the back of Jon's pickup truck and strapped it in, for a run down the Spanaway Runway.

With Bill and Ed pacing and shooting video, Jon and Keith blasted down the runway at full speed.  At about 80 mph Keith triggered the parachute system and it opened just in front of John Winchester who was at mid-field observing the results. The test was a complete success and is now ready to be deployed.  The high speed parachute system is a joint effort between John Winchester, Ed Shadle, Eric McClain and Thomas Aerospace. The aeronautical test bed was built several years ago to functional test aerodynamic devices on the car and validate the values with our CFD simulations.  Built by McVay Mobile welding and designed and instrumented by Steve Wallace, the scientific tool gathers real time data captured with our PCB Piezotronics aquisition system.  Just another in-house tool needed to break the world land speed record.

Keith and Jon also tested the Olympus iSPEED 2 HG high speed video camera in preparation for our next test session.  In the bright sunshine, the practice session simulated some of the conditions we will encounter on the Black Rock playa.  With the capability of shooting 33,000 FPS (frames per second) the Olmpus iSPEED 2 HG gives the team an extremely effective tool to analyze the one second parachute opening sequence in ultra slow motion video.  Olympus and Olympus Industrial also provide the team with NDT / NDI (Non destructive testing / inspection) instrumentation like the iPLEX Borescopes and Phase Array eddy current tools.

The team wishes to thank Spanaway Airport for the use of their runway for conducting our test.

Next week, completion of the windshield work, along with more high speed deployment system work and testing will take place. Logistics are being worked out also for our test session in southern California next month and preparations for it are already getting underway.

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