[Pilots] CAP March Operations Newsletter

[Greg Bestul]

Hello MN Wing Pilots,

Wanted to get you up to speed on what’s going on in our wing operations.
Our rates for self-funded flying are currently $51/hr. for C172 and $60/hr. for the C182. These have been sometimes hard to find, and do change periodically. I plan to have these numbers displayed on the MN wing website operations home page in the near future.
If you haven’t been on the wing website recently, you will be in for a surprise the next time you go to the website. We have transitioned over to our new mnwg.cap.gov website (mncap.org will redirect you to the new site). You can still get to the intranet page by clicking on the “About” drop down then selecting “members” and then “intranet”
March has been a good flying month for us so far, to date we have flown 245 hrs. vs 226 hrs. last year. That puts us at 1145 hours FY to date, a little behind last year but very respectable showing.
We continue to do training with the WALDO camera system, and will be starting some new members into the training pool soon. One obstacle we have come across is that the camera system must be installed and removed by maintenance each time we want to use it. With this in mind we will try and combine training as much as possible to keep the maintenance work load as light as possible. The other downside to this procedure is that we will restrict the airplane that has the WALDO camera on it to only doing WALDO training flights (or actual SAR missions) to preserve the camera equipment.
In a review of our 130-2 maintenance supplement one item that came to light is a note in 130-2 stating that parking brakes should not be set for more than 30 minutes (or with hot brakes). With this in mind, we want to make sure our airplanes are chocked and the parking brakes released when the planes are in the hangars.
We are getting good at keeping the databases up to date on our airplanes, I want to thank all the ops officers and others that have been helping get this done. We are showing very few airplanes with expired databases, and of those they are only one month behind. I talked with one of our CAP-USAF members recently and he relayed to me that they have had this added to their checklist of items to watch for, so they are happy we are keeping things up to date.
One more reminder to be careful when entering data into WMIRS, we still are seeing quite a few simple errors (entering sorties on the NCR missions, carrying times over incorrectly, wrong airplane numbers and/or airports).  Proof read before submitting!
Also, another reminder of the upcoming change to 70-1 regarding landing currency. With the new change if you are not landing current you will have to fly with a CFI to get current again. Flight instructors PLEASE try to make every effort to maintain your landing currency, with limited numbers of instructors we could get into a pickle if all our instructors in a squadron go                  non-current.
Although we have not received any official word yet from NHQ, in my discussions with them and reading the tea leaves it appears now that we will not have a glider program for this summer. NHQ is still in the evaluation process and it appears that it will not be completed before the end of the glider season. Hopefully the outcome will be positive and the gliders will fly again in 2026
Finally, the ugly part of this letter. Funded flying. In past years there has been additional money available if we overflew a mission to get funding to cover the overage. This year I have been advised there will be no additional funds available so if we overfly a funded mission the wing will be responsible for the overage. How this will affect us is as follows:
A5,A17,A23- type missions – we have received funding for the missions we currently have listed in WMIRS, we will keep a close eye of the funding levels and rearrange funds between missions as necessary to make sure we don’t have any overages
A12- Proficiency mission – We have received just over half of our yearly budget (March 30 is halfway through our fiscal year) To help conserve funding at this time we will be limiting all proficiency flights to a maximum of 1.5 hours flying time (even profile 4)
A7 form 5/91 - Checkrides – We have received just under half our funding for this. We want to do our best to limit extra checkrides, try to consolidate your flights to get as many qualifications as possible done with every flight.
A0/A24 – Continue to use the 3.0 hour limit for new/returning members
A15 – Orientation flights We have only received $7500 or our $29,000 budget, so FLY LOTS OF CADETS ON ORIENTATION FLIGHTS!!

Be careful as we get into the busy flying season, especially when moving planes in and out of the hangars!! We have seen a few hangar rash incidents recently and don't want it to turn into an epidemic!!

Fly Safe, Take Care,

Capt. Greg Bestul
Minnesota Wing Director of Operations
Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Air Force Auxiliary
612-251-4786
GoCivilAirPatrol.com<https://www.gocivilairpatrol.com/>
MNCAP.org<https://www.mncap.org/>
[cid:6855fa1f-d4f2-4ebc-8566-846efb3d5f78]



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