Even after spending nearly 1,000 hours in Cessna aircraft over the course of her flying career, when the opportunity came to journey to Cessna's single-engine manufacturing facility for this month's pilot report, " Cessna T182T: Climb High" (see page 68), Associate Editor Julie Boatman jumped at the chance. "It's tough to say this as a writer, but mechanical concepts rarely come together for me unless I can see them in action. So visiting the production line at Cessna was one giant 'a-ha' moment. The fact that future aircraft owners sometimes come in and sign the hulls of their airplanes before they get painted is also a personal touch that we can miss if we focus too much on the numbers." Boatman was also able to fly the T182T during the photo shoot over Grand Lake, Oklahoma, gaining some important pointers from Cessna pilot and formation whiz Kirby Rivera.
In his research for " Airframe and Powerplant: The Techno-Fun Connection" (see page 133), Associate Editor Steve Ells drew on his eight years of experience as a technical representative for the Cessna Pilots Association in Santa Maria, California. While working for CPA, Ells was able to observe firsthand the many ways that a type club can assist its members. Ells learned how to help a type club keep its members informed and rally support when seeking to influence the final outcome in an airworthiness directive process. This experience — plus his 30 years of aircraft maintenance experience (he earned his airframe and powerplant certificate in 1971) — proved valuable to the story.
AOPA photographer Mike Fizer was in Colorado last August to shoot two airplanes: the Turbine Explorer (See " Honey, I Shrunk the Caravan," page 80) and a beautiful de Havilland Beaver, scheduled to appear in the October issue of AOPA Pilot. According to author Michael Maya Charles, "We planned the photo shoot for these two airplanes for separate days, but we lost a day due to un-photogenic weather. Thus, on the crisp Colorado morning that we finished the Beaver air-to-air photos, we also found ourselves double-booked to shoot the Turbine Explorer. It was quite a contrast to climb out of the gnarly 1953-model, radial-engine taildragger into what Explorer Aircraft's Geoffrey Danes says will be the Beaver's replacement — the smooth-skinned, turbine-engine, tricycle-gear, new-age composite Explorer."
Frequent contributor Rick Durden's passion for aviation history and flying old airplanes has given AOPA Pilot a series of articles on the classics that helped define general aviation as it is today. When researching this month's article on the Swift, " Swinging with the Swift" (see page 94), he was fortunate enough to be directed to Scott Anderson, an A&P mechanic who lives his dream. Anderson spends his workdays intimately entwined with the airplanes he most likes at Swift Works, adjacent to the International Swift Association and Swift Museum on McMinn County Airport in Tennessee. After hours, he flies his personal GC-1B, which he restored from nearly scrap metal to better than new. Durden learned the secret of why Anderson went to extraordinary lengths to resurrect this particular Swift, and tells Anderson's story beginning on page 100.
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