January 2, 2010 – A Visit to Crystal

It’s been a month and a half, Christmas is past, as is New Years Day, and it’s time to get out and around albeit in zero-degree temperatures. Dr. Eberling, my Minneapolis-area orthopedic doctor, has cleared me to be able to walk on the ankle without the boot. I decided to go up and see exactly what the JetWing looked like, since I had not even looked it over once since the accident. Steve had done a fantastic job of cleaning up the pieces and getting it back on the trailer and to our house, where he had put it alongside the garage for storage with a tarp over it. There it had stayed untouched while we were engaged in other things, primarily our preparation to move.
So when I decided to go up to Crystal, I went without any expectation but with some hope that there might be a chance to rebuild the poor, battered, and broken JetWing. Steve had said that he didn’t think there was much if any damage to the wing, and I knew the engine should be OK, so it was worth a shot to see if rebuilding was a possibility.
I drove up by myself, taking the camera to document what the JetWing looked like from all sides so I could study and ponder what to do later. Everything worked out well, and my first challenge, which was to get into the hanger on my own happened without any problem and I was able to get in to see it and check the JetWIng out. As I looked it over, I began to formulate a plan in my mind of what to do. It was pretty substantially damaged, but the nature of an ultralight like that is that it’s not made up of much, just tubing, brackets, nuts and bolts. The critical parts are the wing and engine. Both things could not be checked out easily; the engine needed to be run and tested, and the wing was in the wing bag and I could not even look it over at this point.
However, in spite of this, I began to make plans to rebuild the JetWing.