CHRIS WILLS The Wills family have reported that Chris Wills, brother of Justin and Stephen died on May 5. He was in his 79th year. Chris Wills was the founder and Life President of the Vintage Glider Club, the international Vintage Gliding organisation, which has around 1500 members. Chris worked for Hamiltons in Christchurch 1956 - 1958, was secretary of the NZGA during that time, owned Dick’ Georgeson’s Weihe (now in the Ashburton museum) and broke several NZ records flying the Slingsby Eagle with Jon Hamilton. We will bring you a full article on Chris Wills in the next issue. Chris Wills in Kranich in Hungary.
BLANIK MODIFICATIONS ETC
REPLY TO BLANIK PIECE
http://www.aircraftdc.de/ENG/visionen_blanik.htm All is not lost for the Blaniks. The link above leads to a site describing the inspections and structural modifications necessary to allow Blaniks to fly, fully certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Nick Wisnewski says the Supplementary Type Certificate costs 6,500 Euro, and if it is EASA approved this automatically makes it NZCAA approved. He would suggest $15-17,000.00 NZD total. He also mentions that LET (the Blanik manufacturers) are in the process of getting their Non-Destructive Testing inspections approved through EASA as well.
CAA would undoubtedly accept this for installation on NZ Blaniks if it gets EASA STC approval, which seems likely. Because of the NDT inspections, use of high-tech fasteners etc, a CAR Part 145 workshop, such as Air NZ would be required to do the installation (not cheap). BUT although the STC gives a new wing spar life of 6000 hours, it only restores the previous overall airframe life of 3,750 hours – they are looking for customer interest before going on to the next stage of looking at the rest of the aircraft, such as the tailplane attachments. If this proceeds, it will be big money - I suspect more overall than the Llewellyn mod itself.
BY MAX STEVENS
GAVIN WILLS
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June 2011
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