You-all will remember the week of April 17 as the one when they blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I will remember it as when we got two new granddaughters and a Type Certificate.
Some of you will remember my daughter Mary Lou, who was active in ballooning a few years back. She never got a licenses nor her own balloon, but she really did like the sport and the people in it. She had twins in Santa Monica. I haven't seen them yet but her husband, Steve, is mighty proud and the floor nurse at the hospital says they are absolutely lovely. (What else would she say?-Did you ever hear anyone say "Now, there is an ugly baby" or an ugly balloon?). I do remember one balloon we built for some folks in Perris, California that we put a "10% Ugly" surcharge on. We nicknamed it Double Ugly. And then there was the one that was built by Don Piccard Balloons, Inc., while Willy and I lived in Ireland, for the president of the corporation, that the gang called "Harelip". But a nurse calling babies ugly? Never.
The FAA Type Certificate, Number B7CH, is for Carl Gage's SkySailor 90 that I have talked about in this column several times before. Well, it is now real and actual. A done deal. At last.
The project started many many years ago. Now maybe Raven or The Balloon Works can crank them out one after the other, but it didn't work that way for Carl. First, after he built the balloon and went through all the lengthy, and expensive, burner tests, the FAA decided they couldn't "conform" the envelope. He set up shop in the East and then the FAA assigned a new crew and transferred the paper work to Atlanta. He hired an FAA approved "Designated Engineering Representative" and things got worse. Finally he gave up, but then discovered that I had an FAA approved envelope, under a "Supplemental Type Certificate" an "STC", that could be "conformed".
The basket design had been approved and physically tested (with thousands of pounds load and drop testing). So had his burner-with many tons of propane having been flowed through it to prove its design. Putting the parts together would be a "Piece of Cake" for a complete Type Certificate, or "TC". So he bought my STC and modified his TC application to call out my envelope. Then the burner, from L.A. to Atlanta, and finally to Chicago FAA offices had lost its approval and/or conformity along the way. He would have to start from scratch with the burner burn tests and approvals-an impossible task.
Then came "The Devil's Triangle". Now that is a lot of heat in a can, and it puts it up instead of out, making it ideal for use with my "Inside Scoop" that is deployed right down to the burner supports. No problem, the FAA loved it as an off the shelf call-out, The Balloon Works is happy to sell more burners, and we think it is the best available.
Of course, the drawings for my STC were O.K. for an STC but not really suitable for a full TC. So we bought a new computer and AutoCad and copied them, making a thousand corrections and improvements in the drawings along the way. The marriage of the Mirage burner, the SkySailor wicker basket and the Piccard envelope with the "Inside Scoop", Kevlar/Nomex suspension and the redundant parachute top all worked out perfectly.
Finally the flight tests we spoke about in our last column, a complete review by several FAA departments, some fresh changes to the flight manual and Eureka!
Sad about the bomb, delighted with the twins and absolutely relieved to finally get the TC.