Join us for our September TFF meeting on the 24th at the Sheprock/CAP hanger at 121 Municipal Drive, Nampa (KMAN) at 1830 for a Potluck Dinner, or 1900 for our speaker this month. A raffle at the end of the evening rounds things out.

Our speaker this month will be Treasure Valley’s own Jim Price. Jim is going to talk to us about the extreme lengths of engineering design, building and testing of his Rutan Long-EZ (N57JP) and the physical conditioning he went through to achieve his two world records (one for altitude (35,027 ft) and the other for horizontal flight at altitude (34,920 ft). He built his EZ for the record attempt over Minden NV on May 5th 1996, using a normally aspirated Continental O-320, non-turbocharged internal combustion engine. His two FAI C1a World Altitude Records have stood over 30 years.  FAI C1a is a sub-class of airplanes in the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) sporting code, defined as landplanes with a take-off weight of 300-500 kg powered by internal combustion engines. Jim built his own EZ over a span of 11 years and about 4000 hours. In addition to his records, he has flown it all over the US, Canada and even into Mexico. Jim still has his EZ in his hanger at Sunrise (ID40). In his earlier years, Jim was a medic with Special Forces in Vietnam in 1968-69. After leaving the Army, Jim started on the assembly line at General Motors, then moved up into Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and Quality Control and retired after 32 years. His last projects there he worked in Speciality Vehicles working on fun programs like the Presidential Limo and race car replicas. He spends his time traveling around the world now, but mostly back to Vietnam creating new memories to supersede the old ones.