For the unit looking for that *awesome* recruiting display...

[NIN]

https://annarbor.craigslist.org/spo/6041764013.html

Here's the basis..

[SarDragon]

That's a pretty clean looking airplane kit. 

[A.Member]

Seems overpriced by only about $1700. 

[SarDragon]

Meh. The scrap value is several hundred dollars.

Sent from my phone.

[NIN]

Seems overpriced by only about $1700. 

A clever fellow would convince the owner to take a $1700 donation certificate. Not sure what the current process is for that, its been a few (more than 5? Less than a dozen?) years since I've done that.

[TheSkyHornet]

The local flying club offered to sell us the fuselage of a 172 (no wings, empennage cut off at the rear window)  they were scrapping. They wanted $200 for it. I was all in. The seniors were going to make it a project to convert it into a sit-in flight simulator that we could tote to events and use it as a nice Public Affairs/Aerospace Education setup.

The same club then told us they were going to "throw away" a 152 fuselage to free up some hangar space for a new maintenance project they had coming in. Jackpot.

Of course, as it happens many times, that plan didn't go far once the club decided they had other interests and rescinded the offer. But it would have been great had it worked out. Oh well. Still an awesome idea.

[LTC Don]

Just some food for thought:  If your wing has contacts/resources with your state DOT, something like that 152 would make a great static display/memorial set up at a rest-area along a major highway IF it can be restored to display condition and professionally painted and then maintained. 

We have a rest area here that sits between both corridors so it gets major amounts of traffic from both directions.  Unfortunately, there isn't any room for a static since the Army got the space with an artillery piece. 

[NIN]

Some (20+? Yeah..ugh) years ago my group's color guard marched in a local parade.  I don't recall the reasoning from the time (gonna blame old age here..) but we marched in BDUs instead of blues.  This was before the post-9/11 craze of "get married and buried in camouflage," so I don't recall exactly what we were thinking. 

I borrowed 4 or 5 kevlars from my NG unit, and OD green parade slings.  My guys worked pretty hard to make this work, and they were looking darn sharp (but, as I said, in BDUs)

Day of the parade, we have 25-30 seniors and cadets "marshaling" on the parade route, also in BDUs. I'm around the mid-point in the parade, standing 4-5 feet off the curb in the street, with the crowd behind me.  Here comes the Coast Guard Auxiliary with a vehicle towing a huge white-with-an-orange-stripe boat embazoned "US Coast Guard Auxiliary" down the side. 

There is a lady behind me with her 10 or 11 year old kid. She's pointing out the various parade floats the whole time to her little one.

"Look! Coast Guard Auxiliary!" she says.

"yay! Coast Guard!" says the kid.

Here comes my color guard. I'm smug. Mom's gonna get the full measure of CAP here.

"Look honey!" she says, "Army!"

"Cool! Army!"

Suffice to say, I was like "DOOH!"

Then I got to thinking: why couldn't CAP have a thing like this?  I mean, really, how hard would it be to make a visually-functional airplane-on-a-trailer for various display and CAP-specific purposes?  (assuming you could get a plane like this one, and a trailer, for a song)

a 152 is about the biggest you'd want to fit down a street with two lanes in either direction and even then you're gonna need wing walkers to prevent garden variety wingtip rash.  I've been considering a project to create a 2/3 or 3/4 scale 172/182 for the same purposes (and at those sizes, probably easier to transport/handle in your average situations).  Make the wings/struts and maybe the tailplane removable, with some sort of cradle or securing mechanism on the trailer, and Robert (not Eclipse) is your mothers brother.  Make sure the lights/strobes work, your could even have an electric motor lazily turn the prop for you, use a tow-bar attached to your CAP vehicle and have it rolling on its wheels/landing gear (I originally suggested a quad or a golf-cart as motive power, but subsequently, CAP has said those are verboten)

Things you could use it for:

- "Parade Float" (as previously mentioned)
- "Gate guard" in front of your recruiting event. (again, lights & strobes, maybe 2 cadets standing there. Jimmy up some kind of way to attach 6-8 ft banners to the leading edge of each wing for your specific unit or event)
- with sufficient planning and space, wheel it inside some kind of an event.  (A plane inside the high school cafeteria or the mall, assuming you can get it thru a set of double-doors, would be an attention getter)
- An aerospace education project ("this is semi-monocoque construction, cadets" or "see, this is how cable-operated flight controls work") at your unit.
- A team building project to build / maintain it.
- A SAR target (make the nosewheel removable, reinforce the area right underneath the nose gear area. Wheel it out to the edge of a field, pull the wheel, tip it up on its nose. Maybe leave one of the wings off..)

There are certainly other things you could do with it, but thats a start.

[Eclipse]

For starters, where do you keep it?

The answer "Not in my backyard."

Which is basically where all this stuff ends up after a year or two - rusting oxidizing in the sun behind a hangar,
or accumulating municipal fines stashed behind someone's garage. 

We've had fuselages, tail cones, and the like offered over the years. "makes a great SAR target", "Rig it with you simulator for a real experience", yadda.

Always winds up being someone Albatross.

That CG boat is paid for by the CG and comes with the trailer by design, not exactly a stretch to drag it behind the marching band.

[sardak]

I've been considering a project to create a 2/3 or 3/4 scale 172/182 for the same purposes (and at those sizes, probably easier to transport/handle in your average situations).  Make the wings/struts and maybe the tailplane removable, with some sort of cradle or securing mechanism on the trailer

http://medinahaviators.com/parade_info.htm
Wingspan is 20 Feet
· Propellers Rotate
· Landing Lights
· Wing Lights
· Marker Lights
· Yelp, Wail and Air Horns
· A Real Attention Getter
The Only Parade Airplane Built By Piper Aircraft


Trailer on left


Mike

[NIN]

Thats pretty sweet!

For a number of years, my unit had this on a trailer:



in more of a red-white-and-blue Thunderbirds-style paint scheme.

The problem was storage and maintenance. it was suffering from age and the fact that we couldn't store it in a place that was relatively temperature controlled. 

(I have photos of it in our care someplace, just not here)