Bernie Wunder wrote: > What is sad is that I never found > out toward the end of the newsletters what happened to some of the > contributors -like Art Smart - Minnesota in the summer and Alabama in the > winter - did he ever fly?
Art Smart is still alive and kicking. I've met up with him a couple of times in his travels between MN and the gulf coast of AL. He's quite a character, and one of those folks that enriches your life just knowing him. He got his flying alright, with a Subaru engine. Early in the test program he lost his alternator, but by the time he noticed, the electronic ignition was about ready to quit, due to the lack of juice left in the battery. He was over some heavily wooded terrain and packed it into the tree tops. Unless I have my stories confused, he broke enough stuff that he basically had to wait for help, and spent a really cold night up there. Impact with the instrument panel cost him an eye, and he still wears an eye patch today. But he started back to work on another KR, with lots of innovative solutions to prevent a similar failure from ever happening again, but had real problems with his medical for a while. Last I heard though, I think he got it back and was building again, although I won't swear it was a KR this time around. I think he was going to move to AL or FL permanently, so I'll let you know next time I talk to him. And yes, how do think I got so "educated" on KRs? By reading every one of the Newsletters before I even got started building! I put little yellow index tabs on all of the good stuff, like dual sticks, ailerons, horizontal stab, airfoils, etc. As for websites disappearing, I'll bet my wife leaves mine up and running long after I'm gone, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to save it disk or print it out... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
