A nice, warm, busy week here in the world of aviation with some good steady progress on the static air frame and a couple of off-aircraft happenings to talk about.
Firstly, the static airframe. As you know, we’ve had some great progress in the last few weeks and this has continued apace this week with Laurent carrying on with the fabrication and temporary fitting of the fuselage skins. At the same time, David has been producing the cockpit wall structural components that help to give these skin panels extra strength.
David and Murphy have also formed the fuel tank fairing panel which sits over the tank between the instrument panel and Frame 5. Being formed from a piece of 3mm thick commercial grade aluminium, rolling this sheet in our set of rollers was no mean feat for the lads in this heat!
Lawrence meanwhile, has been making progress with the tail section, fabricating a jig and building up the structure around it.
Over in the wing shed, Chris has been fabricating the auxiliary spars for both wings that sit between ribs 14 and 16 and also starting to produce rib 15 for each wing. Once this is done, he plans to move on to producing and fitting the structure around the wheel wells. At the same time, Paul has been fabricating a set of mild steel brackets that mount the centre section of rib 21 to the wing tip mounting brackets for both wings.
Away from the project, Lawrence and Murphy have started their weekly day release to Castle Air in Liskeard to enable them to complete the tasks required for their NVQ units that they cannot cover with us here. This week they had a very busy day, working on one of Castle’s Agusta A109 helicopters. The jobs they carried out included engine compressor washing, a main rotor head damper change, tail rotor gearbox oil change, tyre pressure check, rotor blade inspections and rotor tuning and balancing checks during a ground run, all followed up with a test flight over the coast which they both enjoyed immensely. All of these jobs should cover around 4 of their NVQ units which is a great boost to their learning and apprenticeship progress. Castle Air have been great hosts and the lads are really looking forward to next week’s session. All Images © Parnall Aircraft Company Ltd
