Airfield Letter April 2025

April 1, 2025

WHAT A DIFFERENCE AFTER A FEW MONTHS AND A LOT OF WORK!

We started October with a big mess on our hands and here we are after 6 months with improvements that would have taken a lot longer to make without the benefit of insurance and donations from a GoFundMe drive and, especially, a grant from the Community Foundation of Henderson County. The money part is the easier part; the down and dirty – and I do mean dirty – part comes from volunteer eTort, and a lot of it.

Stop for a minute – airplanes are destroyed or severely damaged in a flash flood, but our great – and I do mean that – great airmen show their optimism by continuing to pay rent for their hangars, knowing that someday they will be back in the air. Not only do they pay rent, they grab their buckets, shovels, brooms and gloves and go about the business to restore their hangars; they don’t just sit back and expect someone else to do the work. What a remarkable thing in this day and age. Those are just some of the “points of light”, to borrow a phrase, that make our aviation community such a special one. Thank you.

Doors for the Museum hangar are here and installation work has started. The March winds hampered progress, but we still work as we can. Getting all the prep work out of the way was a big deal; the project is out of the slide-rule stage and into the hardware phase. Measuring more than twice, we cut only once (we hope).

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Mid-March, Mark, Ed, Richard (paramotor guy from Hot Springs), and Jacob stuck around to get their picture taken . . . Dan and 2 more paramotorists worked earlier, as did Bill Walker and others to start hanging headers for the doors.

Once the doors arrived, Glenn and Mark helped Jerry Moore unload the truck at the 0A7 parking lot – electric lines were too low for the truck to get closer to the hangar.

Then, finally, the most recent days have held a lot of progress . . . door tracks hung, framing prepared, and at long last the first door is in place and stable.

The next steps should come more easily now that we have the first door behind us. The need for good weather without wind is tops on the wish list. Next is the need for volunteers to step up again to see this through. We’re almost there. Mark or Alex will keep you posted – please answer the call when you can lend a hand.