Well, I imagine you were all thinking that I had faded away with the sunset, when all of the sudden, BAM, an update! Yes folks, I am still poking around out here, no thanks to the Election and it's subsequent effect on this Nation's economy. I'll try to explain...
You might remember in one of my previous updates me mentioning the sudden
lack of gainful employment. The company I worked for saw fit to lay
off me and 9,999 of my fellow workers, thanks to a depressed market for
mobile communication devices worldwide. Now, having previously been
a computer consultant before this job, I have faced the job market before,
so I figure that finding another job would be a rather simple task.
WRONG!
No sir, seems that, while I was happily working at my new job, the market somehow got saturated with people with my qualifications. Remember all those commercials for DeVry and ITT talking about how there's "millions of jobs in IT just WAITING to be filled!" This was, fundamentally, true. Trouble is, when the economy starts to suck wind, then first thing they cut (and the last thing they should) is support people, starting with us poor contractors. So now, there's 1 million jobs, and there's 5 million out of work breadwinners gunning for them. Net result, the mean average pay for what I do went down by $10,000 to $20,000/yr. This doesn't sound like a problem on the surface, considering I was well paid to begin with, but when your new prospective employer asks for your salery history and sees that you'll be making 2/3 of what you made before with him, he'll think you're a high risk for jumping ship as soon as those higher paying jobs open back up. Net result: "Thanks for the resume, but you're 'overqualified'."
So, your intrepid builder, after 4 months of "we'll get back to you" and collecting unemployment, decides it's time for a career change. After some soul searching (and talking with my Pop (UAL Captain, retired), I decided that I wasn't getting any younger and I should take this opportunity to chase the career I originally wanted as a kid... well, sort of. I'm about 1400 hours from being a hirable airline pilot (from what I can gather), so I decided to go and get my Aircraft Dispatch license! So, off I go to school to get my license, which I pass with flying colors and receive on September 5th, 2001. With license and job offer in hand, I head off to Tennessee to start my new career as an Aircraft Dispatcher! I arrive in beautiful Nashville, TN. and start making arrangements for an apartment and my first day of work. The next day, I wake up and get ready to go down to the apartment complex to sign my new lease, but first I click on the television to see what's going on in the world. That was the morning of Sepember 11th, 2001. Given the events of the day, I make arrangements with the apartment complex that I would sign the lease, but they would give me a "backout clause" because, you know, my new job is in the airline industry, and that industry at that moment was taking the rest of the day off. The drive home (thank God I didn't FLY to Nashville) was surreal. I've lived in the Chicago area almost my entire life. Not ONCE in my entire existance there could you look up in the sky and not find an airplane... Until that day.
The next day, Midway Airlines officialy shut down their business. Every other airline in the Nation broke out the axe and started sharpening it, preparing to street some of their people. The job market that looked so favorable just a few days ago suddenly became more hostile then the one I sought to leave. As Capt. Kirk would say, "the situation is grim". I literally was eyeing over the classified looking for a truck driving school, and considering my financial outlook (I had blown a significant chunk of cash to get my dispatch license), flipping burgers looked like a reasonable alternative to starving to death.
Obviously, stuck in the middle of this was my little Zodiac project. Every day, I'd go out into the garage and look at it, and wonder if I'd ever be able to finish it. Financially, what looked to be so attainable before loomed before me like an impassible wall. Even if I WERE able to land a job as a dispatcher, I'd effectively take a 2/3 pay cut for the effort, and my chances of remaining in the Chicago area were slim to none and Slim had left last week sometime. Into storage it went, with the hope that it wouldn't sit there for the rest of my natural born life.
Enter Mike. You all remember him as my friend who was helping me with this project (you see him several times in past updates grinding/riveting/posing). Since Mike was in the same line of work as me, and since he was facing the same wall as I hiring wise, he went with me to Dispatch school. The thinking on both our parts being, "if you've got nothing, you've got nothing left to lose". He too had found a job, and he too lost it before he started it. Things were a bit more tight for him, though, so when the job evaporated, he headed to Michigan to persue an opportunity there.
Fast forward two months. I'm sitting in the basement trying to figure out where to go from here when the phone rings. It's the airline Mike went to work for (or should I say, went to NOT work for). They're looking for him because they've got a position available. About the same time, I get an email from Mike stating that the airline wanted to offer him a job, but he was already comitted in Michigan and feel free to gun for the position. This I do with great gusto, and so, to make a long story short, I'm hired. I'm now an aircraft dispatcher...
In Wichita, Kansas.
So, fast forward, my wife manages to land a job with the same airline at the Crew Desk. This puts us in good shape financially, so I set about looking for a place to continue my project (since, you know, building in an apartment is HARD). Now, if you're new to Wichita, it's basically the Aviation Capitol of the world. Boeing, Beech-Raytheon and Cessna all have a presence here. Even more fascinating, there are no less then a dozen airports within a 10 mile radius of Wichita Mid-Continent Airport (KICT). Flying around here is challenging, especially on the east side of town, as there is in almost immediate succession from north to south, Jabira Airport (runway oriented N-S), the Beech Factory airfield (runway oriented N-S), and McConnell Air Force Base (Runways oriented, you guessed it, N-S, and with B-1B flying the pattern). I flew an orientation flight out of Jabira, and it was... interesting. Anyway, I figured that, with a million airports in the area, finding a nice little hangar to build out of would be a rather simple task....
WRONG!
Everyone out here also has a damn airplane, so it seems! Typical wait for a hangar around here is in the 3 year range. I was, to put it mildly, bummed. Resigned to the fact that there would be no airplane building for me in the near future, I none the less went to the local EAA chapter meeting. Let me tell you something. If you're a kit builder, especially one new to town and in need of guidence, you NEED to go to your local EAA chapter. The meetings might be snoozers at times, but the people there are a priceless resource. I talked with some of the people there about my problem, and a week later, I get a phone call from one of the members tipping me off to a hangar that's come up for rent at Maize airport. This is PERFECT for me! The rent is cheap, the airport is 5 minutes away from my apartment and 10 minutes away from work, the electricity is plentiful, the floor is concrete, the doors lock, and 7 of the 10 hangars there have either kit projects or restorations in progress! Jackpot. With one possible exception....
Yup, I'm going to have to learn how to fly off grass again... Haven't done that since my initial training!
So, now I'm trying to make some financial arrangements to accellerate this
process a bit.. If I can come up with money for the entire project, I anticipate
that I'll be airborne by this time next year, at the latest. We shall
see. At the moment, though, I plan to pick up my tools and parts
from Chicago and transport them down here to Wichita in mid March, with
construction to recommence shortly thereafter.
Next Day