D-day for our airplane building experience - the kits have finally arrived!

After some delays with customs, our kits (the empennage and the wings) have finally arrived - first at the Airplane Factory, and then to our doorstep! This was very exciting! For Katya, Sasha’s sister and our summer airplane building intern as well: One of the crates was a little bumped: but the hole did not go through, and the contents were all intact :) An observant reader would notice that the pictures above are of a parking spot and not a garage - that is correct, we don’t have a garage/house to store the parts, for now they’ll have to live in the living room of our one-bedroom. This is how the living room looked like when we finished hauling everything upstairs:

It took us (Katya, Sasha, and Peter) half a day Wednesday and half a day Thursday to go through both kits and check that all parts were there. The empennage kit had all the parts, however, the wing had a couple of things missing; and we had two right skins WG-SKN-004-C-F-0 (instead of one left, WG-SKN-104-C-F-1 and one right); some parts had version (last digit) number mismatch. Barry from The Airplane Factory (TAF) promised to get us small missing parts by the time we visit on 5th of July, but skins have to be ordered from South Africa.

While unpacking and checking stuff, we had a small “incident” - Peter put the empennage skins standing on a corner, and a corner got bent :/ TAF suggested we try to flatten it back, and send back the pictures of the flattened skin. We’ll keep posting to the blog with progress on this for any other readers who may have spent too much time as theorists and software developers :)