Attendance was a total of 41 members and 7 guests. $144 was collected for the raffle.
The dinner entrees were Champagne Chicken with mushroom-champagne sauce or Slow Roasted Prime Rib with Au Jus and Horseradish Sauce. Following dinner, the Flight Captain reconvened the meeting. A motion was made and seconded to accept the Minutes of the past meeting as written.
Darrel Delong briefed that he had flight history from our members that covered 2000 years of service and 91 combat tours. He left blank forms for any one that still needed to fill one out.
Flight Captain Waddle reported a loss of $ 1500 at our last Christmas dinner. We are saving $1200 a year in sending out the newsletter via email. Other changes have been made for this Christmas. We have eliminated the band to save $ 900. This year the party will be at the Westwood Country Club, a nice high-quality club.
Matthew Brown and John Goodrich, two CFIP cadets, were introduced & spoke of their soloing experience. They were each given flight jackets by the flight at the dinner for their accomplishments.

Three bottles of spirits were raffled.
Dan introduced our speaker, Rip Torn, a former military pilot who still flies for Delta. He briefed on changes to the National Air Space System. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result. He sees this happen frequently, and the result is a waste of a lot of money. The Air Force C-5 and C-17 have the latest technology, but the other players, commercial aviation, private aviation, and the shippers all have varying capabilities. All have a voice at the table and are wont to throw their weight around.
The FAA NEXGEN Air Transportation Plan is the government's tool to bring sanity out of chaos. The following areas are being addressed: Navigation, communications, surveillance, air traffic management, airport surface improvements, aircraft designs, environment, and the human in the loop. The task is huge and complex.
GPS has become the global standard for navigation. It can be jammed and spoofed and is vulnerable to cyber attacks. We are still replacing ground based nav aids with satellite based systems. Data Link is going to provide some closer and constant separation. It's great for station keeping across the Atlantic. Surveillance is enhanced by ADS-B out and M-Lat. (http://www.bangkok.icao.int/edocs/cns/mlat_concept.pdf)
Boeing has finally delivered the first 787 which is a significant evolution. Besides the fiber structure, their saw tooth exhaust cuts the sound by abut 4 db. The chevrons have tips that are bent very slightly into the flow. This creates vortices that enhance the mixing rate of the adjacent flow streams.
An aircraft in Alaska is lost every two days. The FAA did a test of the benefits of data link in Alaska. Within 6 months, it cut the accident rate to the stateside rate. One aircraft that crashed at night was found about 15 minutes after arriving at the projected site
Of course, the use of UAVs has a problem with "See and Avoid"
The Flight Captain closed the meeting