April 2008

04.04.2008: Today I sent the application form to the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation to register our project and to receive a callsign for our plane.

As many of the forms to fill and processes to follow are not exactly self explaining I decided to make all the forms available under the new section "documents". This might help other builders in their work. In case anybody has questions just send me a mail.

05.04.2008: Today I attended the seminar on final certification, which is organised once a year by the EAS. They noticed that quite often final approval is delayed due to incomplete documentation or incorrectly filled forms, so they decided to organise a workshop to help builders who are getting near the end of their project. They even decided to cut the fee for final approval in half for those who have attended the workshop, as they expect less work to do. I find this a great idea, as there is probably nothing more upsetting than having to delay the first flight due to missing paperwork.

I know we have not even started building yet, but as we want to finish in one year I thought I'd rather attend the workshop now. I also like to know long in advance what is coming up, in order to already prepare items that take some time. Such a case is for example the Aircraft Flight Manual (AFM), for which they gave the advice to start writing it when still building, as time where it is to cold in the workshop, where one is waiting for parts, or can not build for any other reasons can be used for that. In my case I will do this over the next two months, as I will be working in Australia again. The EAS is soon going to publish a sample AFM, which can be used as a starting point, but in our case we received an excellent generic AFM from CZAW which can just be customised to the individual plane.

I was asked to simplify access to the latest entry on my building log, so I will probably add a direct link to the main page. Should be ready in a few days.

13.04.2008: I am back in Australia. I will spend another six weeks working in Sydney, so no progress with building. I am however quite busy with paperwork. I started with the equipment list, electrical consumers list, electrical schematics etc.

Last Wednesday I also received the official project approval from the EAS, which basically allows me to start building. I still do not have an official confirmation, however, regarding who will be my project supervisor, but it seems that the EAS will approve my request to get Andreas Portner. Andreas lives in the same town as me, built a Breezer metal plane of similar design as the Sportcruiser, and is on the board of our flying club together with me.

I added some documents to the documents folder.

17.04.2008: Yesterday I finally received the confirmation that Andreas Portner has been assigned to us as project advisor. The advisor represents the EAS in the project. He is responsible for signing off a number of milestones during the building process.

I also managed today to get the call sign for our plane (after having had to call the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation three times). It is:

HB-YNL

What about calling the plane "No Limits"? Cool eh?

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