Beech Aero Club

Come on down to historic Republic Field on Long Island for our Northeast Fly-In, this Saturday the 2nd.

Want to read BAC news items through an RSS feed? Want to update your calendar automatically with our fly-ins? Over the years we've developed the tools to do so, however at the time they were relatively "cutting edge" technology and most people didn't have the necessary software to take advantage of them. Many more people do now, so if you are wondering how to get some of our syndicated content, read on. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's okay too, you can safely ignore the geeky tools and still not miss anything.

Did you know that you can receive a notification via email whenever anyone posts a reply to a topic you have participated in within the Discussion Forums? It is true! Near the bottom of the form that you post while creating a new topic, or responding to an existing topic is a checkbox which says "Notify me when a reply is posted".

BAC Founding Director Tom Corcoran was quoted in an AOPA article about "correcting" an unfavorable AP news item on General Aviation. Here is his "Letter To The Editor" of the Patriot Ledger in Quincy. For more ideas on how to get the truth re GA and the FAA Funding Plans, log onto the AOPA website. Better yet...join AOPA, or EAA, or any other alphabet GA group.

Recently a few people have asked me about the ability to receive emails or notifications when topics in the Discussion Forums have been updated. Yes! This functionality has always existed, however you might not receive notifications based on the preferences you set when you joined.

Mark Miller has grabbed the lead from Bo Boggs in the 2006 President's Trophy race.

I've updated the Map of Members page on the BAC website. I've finally uncovered a more reliable international airport database to pull lat/long information from. Also when I build the original map Google Maps had not yet released their mapping API so I couldn't reliably draw a World map. So now the map shows what airports around the world have BAC members.

I've been meaning to build this for a long time. Since it is BAC's birthday real soon I thought this would be my present to BAC. You can now view a map of our members. Unfortunately due to poor availability of airport databases outside of the US and appropriate (and free) mapping software it is USA only right now... but I hope this changes soon.

Today the BAC website reached a new milestone. Just before noon EST Kerry Muller visited the Product Discounts page marking the 1,000,000th page viewed on this site!

If you use a calendar program that supports subscribing to ICS calendars such as Apple's iCal or Mozilla's Sunbird then you may subscribe to our calendar. Read more to see a list of programs that support the iCalendar format on Macintosh, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Feeling lost? Need vectors to your favorite BAC page? Some long overdue changes have been made to the BAC website.

I've made a small (highly requested) update to the Members by Aircraft and Members by Region pages. Now, if the user has submitted a photo of their plane for the homepage a camera icon will appear next to their username. Clicking on the username will show you the photo of the plane.

Who's birthday is it today - Jan 24????

I spoke to Alton Marsh of the AOPA magazine. He will be starting his article on Sierras soon for the magazine sometime in the future. He sounded really interested in showing the great ability of the planes to carry flexible loads and people in great comfort. He explained the usual methods of collecting real world data on the performance of the test planes. Hopefully he will be suitably impressed and will be able to show off our planes in a great article.

You may notice something new on the left side of the site, BAC Chat. It is what is known as a "Shoutbox". It isn't meant for any sort of important conversation, just entertainment. So take a shout, brag about going flying today when everyone else was stuck in the office, or whatever you feel like.

The word "Sundowner" is making strides in Internet slang. Someone who is known as a Sundowner is "A person who changes his or her daily sleep schedule to coincide with being awake when Web traffic is lowest (i.e., late at night)." I my business I certainly know a few "Sundowners" and I'm starting to become one myself. Often with computer server administration upgrades, configuration changes, etc need are often performed in the wee hours of the morning when less people will be impacted by any downtime.

There are three new pages on the website today. By popular demand there is now a list of BAC members sorted by aircraft model as well as a list of BAC members sorted by region. Also new is a list of vendors with discounts for BAC members. And many more new site features are in the works!

BAC hit a couple of milestones over the past week. A few days ago we crossed the mark of 200 paid users. Then today our webserver served up its 100,000th page view! Stay tuned as more great things are coming!

A new poll was added today so go to the homepage, vote early, and vote often! Also a more sophisticated search function has been added. Click on Search from the main menu and give it a try. You can restrict your search to certain parts of the website as well as do "and" and "or" word searches. More to come soon!

I would like to let our membership know that our BAC website is certainly in both gracious and capable hands. Paula and I have been visiting in the New Hampshire and Maine area (Northern NH and the Sugarloaf area of ME). We were fortunate enough to meet both Tim and his lovely girlfriend Meghan, two evenings in a row. Tonight they had us to their home, where they cooked fresh mussels and whole Maine lobsters for us... and boy, were they ever delicious!

The Musketeermail archives are now searchable from the BAC website. Look to the left side of the page for the Musketeermail Archive link. You can search by message title or message body. Currently the archive holds about 16,000 of the ~23,000 messages through May of 2004. More will be added to the archive soon. Don't forget too that every page of the BAC website has a search box on it where you can search the entire BAC website. Try out both searches, you might be surprised how much content we have!

A Photo Gallery has been added to the website. I've added photos from the North East fly-in in May as a sample. Members, submit your photos from fly-ins or just show-off your bird! Be sure to check out the slide-show function too. If you are not on a broadband connection the slideshow will work best with a longer refresh time.