Lady Vi RUNS!
A long way from being found in a storage unit near Little Rock Arkansas. Rutan Aircraft Flying Experience Volunteers spent all of 2021 installing a donated IO-360, thank you Allan Blythe! New instrument panels were fabricated and installed donated Grand Rapids Technologies EFIS, thank you Rick Hall! New wiring and all the needed plumbing and connections to get it running, thank you JetGuys!
Many thanks to Bob Stevens who literately lived in a camper at the airport for a month at a time to help get Lady Vi going.
Curtiss Porter commuted from Salt Lake City to do the wiring of the instrument panels, EFIS and Radios.
Thank you to all the companies! B&C Specialties donated a starter, alternator and regulator. Light Speed Ignitions donated a Plasma 3 ignitions system. Sabre Manufacturing a prop extension. Pacific Oil Cooler donated a big cooler for the big engine! Aircraft Spruce, who supports us with a great discount on materials.
EDMO Distributing helped us with a FlightLine 760 radio. Many more items like a tranpsonder and intercom people just sent us or sold to us cheap. “Super Dave” had is LongEZ”s exhaust ceramic coated , then realizing we needed pipes for LadyVi gave them to us for the cost of the coating. Canard people are great!
Many stopped in while passing by just to help for a few hours. Evan and Marrian Winick helped between training flights in the Canard Flight Academy Speed Canard.
It's this type of grass roots effort that makes RAFE do what seems to be the impossible. There's still a lot do. We need foam to modify the cowing to fit the much bigger engine. Most the rest is just labor. Then there's all the test flying. As far as we know there are no VariViggens flying anymore. With everyone's support we should get Lady Vi to Oshkosh this summer!
Thank You and have a VARI Happy New Year!
Ryszard Zadow,
President, RAFE
Read more about Lady Vi at: https://www.rutanaircraftflyingexperience.org/post/2020/02/07/lady-vi-a-rare-find
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