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By Oshkosh, things were beginning to turn around a little. The plane was fully painted. We had a pretty good spot on the flight line, and I was able to fly quite a bit. 8 The magazine writers were sniffing around quite a bit and I knew we were going to be getting some good exposure soon. I had had a very bothersome oil leak from my engine on the entire trip to Florida, but had solved the problem before the trip to Oshkosh, and that was better. All in all the trip went well and we came back very encouraged. The fall and winter were pretty slow. A few new builders joined the group and we set up a wing assembly shop and started assembling several sets of wings for some of our builders to keep busy. Then in December, the January issue of Kitplanes came out with the Goose on the cover and a nice story inside. That time of year is a time when the interest in things related to flying is at it’s lowest, but we still saw a jump in inquiries and orders for videos & info. Then in the May issue, Custom Planes Magazine came out with a really nice spread on us with a lot of nice pictures and a good long well written article. This added to the momentum and was timed perfectly for Sun & Fun.

MOLDED FLAPERONS-(sometime in May)
At this writing I am heavily involved in making the molds for the new flaperons. These flaperons have performed very well on N96GG and I am very pleased with them in both their aileron characteristics and their flap characteristics. They have demonstrated absolutely NO flutter characteristics under any circumstances. They have been bounced, stalled, and rocked and rolled on water, on land, and up to 10,000 feet so far! They have flown from Dallas to Sun & Fun twice, Oshkosh once, Abilene where the plane took "Best Seaplane", and 100s of other lesser flights accumulating about 130 hours to date.

These flaperons are designed to be balanced down the entire length of the leading edge which eliminates any torquing tendency associated with balance arms on the ends of long narrow control surfaces such as ours. I’m not saying that flaperons with mass balance arms on the end are

 inherently dangerous, but rather that there is a difference in the way the mass balance bears on the flaperon if it is distributed along the entire length of the leading edge rather than all on one end. The weight of the balance is distributed evenly on all of the hinges whereas the weight of a balance arm is all born by one hinge. The weight of the balance in a single balance arm is always exerting a twisting force on the control surface even when at rest, but this twisting or torquing is magnified greatly by G forces. Surfaces balanced along the entire leading edge present no twisting forces to the control surface either when at rest or when under load.

These flaperons also leave the lines of the wing undisturbed and greatly simplify the end treatment and total work of finishing the wing tip.Scott Gettings experimented with molding some sample sections of a flaperon and graciously sent me the results for review. I was impressed and it gave me the incentive to go ahead and pursue the flaperons as molded parts rather than the builder being required to hot wire and build the flaperons from scratch. These molded parts are going to save the builders 100’s of hours of build time and they will be absolutely uniform. We all owe Scott a debt of gratitude for the work he did on this and for pushing me into going ahead with something I have wanted to do for a long time.

I am currently working very hard on the molds for these flaperons and this week I finally got the biggest of the problems worked out and the project is going ahead rapidly now. Hopefully they will be available very soon.

(middle of June)
The following was written after the immediately preceding piece, but I left the other piece in anyway.

PRE-MOLDED FLAPERONS!!!
As the Glass Goose program has developed, I have had to make hard decisions, most of which involved placing priorities on those things that needed to be changed or created to make the plane and the program better. I am not bashful in telling you that sometimes I felt like I was fighting the whole world
GLASS GOOSE GAZETTE * ISSUE #17, June 15, 2000
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