"Type training" ops manual changes

[fly_tornado]

What makes you think any of these rule changes are designed to stop people killing themselves? Ft, if that's what you think Casa are concerned with, then you don't know Casa.

I know CASA are wanting to get as many planes out of the air so they can start developing a licensing framework for drones and UAV, which I assume is the preferred development path for light aviation.

 

 

[motzartmerv]

Hmmmm. No. I don't agree. They are making it very difficult for uav's ATM.

 

 

[fly_tornado]

It's all about the finger of blame.

The finger of blame only stops when the accident rate drops though. Wait until a UAV takes out a Jabiru, then CASA have to make a choice.

 

 

[Bob Llewellyn]

The finger of blame only stops when the accident rate drops though. Wait until a UAV takes out a Jabiru, then CASA have to make a choice.

I sense a market opportunity for an eight-gun 95:10...

 

 

[Bob Llewellyn]

I sense a market opportunity for an eight-gun 95:10...

... or AAMs (defensive only, of course) for jabirus...

 

 

[fly_tornado]

There is definitely a war for the lower airspaces starting soon and CASA are definitely in no way equipped to deal with it.

 

 

[Bob Llewellyn]

There is definitely a war for the lower airspaces starting soon and CASA are definitely in no way equipped to deal with it.

I'm SURE I could fit a minigun to a Drifter, FT ...for peaceful purposes only... :cops:hang on, am I bringing the thread into disrepute???

 

 

[Bandit12]

Assumptions are the bane of any statistician - they come back to bite you no matter how careful you are in allowing for, controlling for, or otherwise explaining why they might not be as big a concern as others may think. I think Bob has done an admirable job of justifying his assumptions, but they will never be accepted until proven properly. Which will never happen with the amount and quality of data available.

 

Another factor that must be accepted is the perspective of the researcher. An engineer will look for a design/maintenance problem. A psychologist will look for a human factors problem. An educator will look for a training problem. A DAME will look for a medical problem. A regulator will look for a blame problem.....(okay, maybe that's a little cynical). Put a team together of all of them (except maybe the last) and decide together what data needs to be collected by each to investigate the problems effectively, and go out and collect it for a decade. Then maybe there will be no need for assumptions. In the mean time, cover the assumptions as best can be done, and then do something. As sure as anything, with fatalities on the rise in recent years, if RA-Aus doesn't do something, the regulator will.

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

What makes you think any of these rule changes are designed to stop people killing themselves? Ft, if that's what you think Casa are concerned with, then you don't know Casa.

Agree. CASA is only interested in reducing its liability under S8.2© of the Civil Aviation Act 1988. **** covering, in other words.

 

 

[motzartmerv]

There is definitely a war for the lower airspaces starting soon and CASA are definitely in no way equipped to deal with it.

I think you will find that Casa are inline with ICAO on this and casr 101 is covering things at the moment. They are making it very difficult to gain an ops certificate for UAv's . Trust me, my other job is training people for their Uav tickets;)

 

 

[motzartmerv]

Agree. CASA is only interested in reducing its liability under S8.2© of the Civil Aviation Act 1988. **** covering, in other words.

Yep. That's it. When people understand that, all of a sudden the rules start to crystallize:)

 

 

[Oscar]

If CASA provides for a reasonable maintenance regime that caters for RPL licenced, owner-operated, non-airwork usage but factory (or not actually self)-made aircraft, I'm personally starting to think that could be damn attractive. Surely, the operational differences between let's say a J230 and a C150 or even C172 for a pilot competent in either is far less than the differences between a J230 and a Drifter/Thruster/X-air or similar?

 

Is this proposed change a well-intentioned but insufficiently thought-out response (and was the 'question' the right one anyway?) A different but basically similar aircraft isn't going to change the nature of the pilot, either in terms of her/his fundamental grasp of flying or her/his attitude to risk, capacity to judge situations etc. I can absolutely see the value in a check-flight but the concept of needing a formal 'endorsement' for a different type (at least one that is certificated to the same general standards of aerodynamic and structural qualities) seems to me to be a solution to a problem that quite possibly doesn't really exist.

 

The comment in the Ops Manual changes that there may need to be some sort of training in and demonstration of competence for appreciably different types of operational use (e.g. STOL operation), however, may have considerable merit. Perhaps we should be asking the RAA Ops people (and since the proposal has apparently been initiated by the Board - the Board itself via one's local rep.) to go back and examine what the problems they perceive with the way things are at the moment actually are and whether this proposal is in fact the most appropriate form of response?

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

I'm not arguing for eliminating maintenance. Some maintenance is obviously necessary. What I am suggesting is that if you design so less maintenance is required, safety and reliability are improved. Part of that is because whenever maintenance occurs, errors are possible. Most people who have been involved in aircraft maintenance could give examples of problems that occurred after maintenance - but to repeat, I am not arguing that that means the maintenance should not have occurred.

Remember that it all started with the Skycraft Scout. The people who wrote the original design standards for ultralight aircraft tried to "simplify" the certification process - which was seen as the major cost factor - by omitting things from the standard. In effect, they started with the obsolete standard, CAR 3, which already lacked any requirement to calculate the safe fatigue life, or otherwise make the structure damage-tolerant, and also largely ignored any requirement to produce a maintenance manual; and took a machete to it and cut out a lot of other things - gust loads, for one. The concept was that, firstly, the things were butterflies and not likely to fly more than 100 hours per year; and secondly, that if (when) problems arose, they would be dealt with by issuing ADs; and anyway, they flew so slowly that it was not really necessary to bother calculating the gust loads. Also, those were the days when everybody did his own car maintenance. A Drifter looks like the sort of thing any handyman could build using a Wolf Cub electric drill and a hacksaw, starting with a Hills Hoist, and people felt that building aircraft had at last come into everybody's backyard capability. Fatigue life? What's that?

Concepts such as designing for minimum maintenance were not even dreamed about; the attitude to even CAR 3 aircraft (such as most of the Cessnas and Pipers from the 1950s thru 1980s) was epitomised by a Piper sales rep, who gave a spruik at the NSW Royal Aero Club, on the latest version of the PA-28. When somebody pointed out that the original PA-28s the club had purchased were already showing signs of corrosion, he reply was "Gawdam, man, those airplanes are five yars ole!".

 

What has in fact been happening, ever since it progressed past the Skycraft Scout, is the re-invention of the aeroplane. The evolution from open frame, externally-braced aircraft such as the Drifter and the Thruster, to enclosed bone & rag things like the Lightwing & the Skyfox, to stressed-skin devices like the Jabiru and Tecnam, is almost an exact replica of the progression from the Wright Flier No 8 to the Cessna 172 - the differences have mainly been due to modern materials. We even had a few biplanes along the way. though they hardly made a dent in the progress.

 

Now we're starting to see the necessity of re-inventing FAR 23 - or even going a bit further, to include low-maintenance design. This is, I suppose, a natural consequence of the fact that, far from the fix-it-yourself attitude of the 1960s, we are now in the "throw-away white goods" era where people have lost the basic skills to do maintenance, and anyway can't be bothered with it.

 

The whole idea started out with the belief that "there has to be a simpler way". If you study history, this is a recurring theme; the first manifestation of it was the "Flying Flea" of Henri Mignet; the second one was Bensen's Gyrocopter; the third was the rogallo-wing hang-glider; and the fourth was the ultra-light aeroplane. They all go through much the same phases. They all have small groups of fanatics who persist with the original idea after the mainstream has moved on. They all have fundamental shortcomings; and by the time people have identified the shortcomings and addressed them, somebody else says "Hell, this is too complicated - there HAS to be a simpler way!" - and the cycle starts again, in a new guise. Overall, it does not seem particularly sensible, to me. I wonder at the overall sanity of the human race, actually.

 

The way to break out of this endless loop, if anybody actually wants to, is to do some reading; Stinton's book "The Design of the Aeroplane" is not a bad starting point. The statement "those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it" is observably correct. How about we look at all this experience, and make our minds up what we really think personal aircraft should be (and obviously that will need to be divided into several categories), and in effect present the manufacturers with a realistic design specification?

 

Or am I being altogether too logical?

 

 

[Bob Llewellyn]

Remember that it all started with the Skycraft Scout. The people who wrote the original design standards for ultralight aircraft tried to "simplify" the certification process - which was seen as the major cost factor - by omitting things from the standard. In effect, they started with the obsolete standard, CAR 3, which already lacked any requirement to calculate the safe fatigue life, or otherwise make the structure damage-tolerant, and also largely ignored any requirement to produce a maintenance manual; and took a machete to it and cut out a lot of other things - gust loads, for one. The concept was that, firstly, the things were butterflies and not likely to fly more than 100 hours per year; and secondly, that if (when) problems arose, they would be dealt with by issuing ADs; and anyway, they flew so slowly that it was not really necessary to bother calculating the gust loads. Also, those were the days when everybody did his own car maintenance. A Drifter looks like the sort of thing any handyman could build using a Wolf Cub electric drill and a hacksaw, starting with a Hills Hoist, and people felt that building aircraft had at last come into everybody's backyard capability. Fatigue life? What's that?Concepts such as designing for minimum maintenance were not even dreamed about; the attitude to even CAR 3 aircraft (such as most of the Cessnas and Pipers from the 1950s thru 1980s) was epitomised by a Piper sales rep, who gave a spruik at the NSW Royal Aero Club, on the latest version of the PA-28. When somebody pointed out that the original PA-28s the club had purchased were already showing signs of corrosion, he reply was "Gawdam, man, those airplanes are five yars ole!".

 

What has in fact been happening, ever since it progressed past the Skycraft Scout, is the re-invention of the aeroplane. The evolution from open frame, externally-braced aircraft such as the Drifter and the Thruster, to enclosed bone & rag things like the Lightwing & the Skyfox, to stressed-skin devices like the Jabiru and Tecnam, is almost an exact replica of the progression from the Wright Flier No 8 to the Cessna 172 - the differences have mainly been due to modern materials. We even had a few biplanes along the way. though they hardly made a dent in the progress.

 

Now we're starting to see the necessity of re-inventing FAR 23 - or even going a bit further, to include low-maintenance design. This is, I suppose, a natural consequence of the fact that, far from the fix-it-yourself attitude of the 1960s, we are now in the "throw-away white goods" era where people have lost the basic skills to do maintenance, and anyway can't be bothered with it.

 

The whole idea started out with the belief that "there has to be a simpler way". If you study history, this is a recurring theme; the first manifestation of it was the "Flying Flea" of Henri Mignet; the second one was Bensen's Gyrocopter; the third was the rogallo-wing hang-glider; and the fourth was the ultra-light aeroplane. They all go through much the same phases. They all have small groups of fanatics who persist with the original idea after the mainstream has moved on. They all have fundamental shortcomings; and by the time people have identified the shortcomings and addressed them, somebody else says "Hell, this is too complicated - there HAS to be a simpler way!" - and the cycle starts again, in a new guise. Overall, it does not seem particularly sensible, to me. I wonder at the overall sanity of the human race, actually.

 

The way to break out of this endless loop, if anybody actually wants to, is to do some reading; Stinton's book "The Design of the Aeroplane" is not a bad starting point. The statement "those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it" is observably correct. How about we look at all this experience, and make our minds up what we really think personal aircraft should be (and obviously that will need to be divided into several categories), and in effect present the manufacturers with a realistic design specification?

 

Or am I being altogether too logical?

Yes. Yes you are. You see, everyone who tried it before, DIDN't KNOW what I know... they said I'm mad, but I'll show them... I'LL SHOW THEM ALL (wipes foam from mouth)... off to Bunnings for a Chinese mower; off to Big W for a kid's bike; off to Ag Supplies for some aluminium tubing... and the SkySmart Scout will RE-INVENT AVIATION!!!!!!!!!!(!!!!!)

 

 

[farri]

As sure as anything, with fatalities on the rise in recent years, if RA-Aus doesn't do something, the regulator will.

Geese Bandit! I was with you all the way until that line!....Not enough to do something! The something can be completely in the wrong direction to the objective. It`s not even enough to identify the problem! To solve the problem the correct solution needs to be found, then applied.

 

How about we look at all this experience, and make our minds up what we really think personal aircraft should be (and obviously that will need to be divided into several categories), and in effect present the manufacturers with a realistic design specification? Or am I being altogether too logical?

By your logic, probabily spot on! By mine! You`re not.

 

Who will 'WE' be to look at all this experience and how do you propose to reach a final decission on what a personal aircraft with realistic design specification should be. Who will the manufacturers be and will they want to build this perfect aircraft. Furthermore, will anyone want it?

 

Frank

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

Yes. Yes you are. You see, everyone who tried it before, DIDN't KNOW what I know... they said I'm mad, but I'll show them... I'LL SHOW THEM ALL (wipes foam from mouth)... off to Bunnings for a Chinese mower; off to Big W for a kid's bike; off to Ag Supplies for some aluminium tubing... and the SkySmart Scout will RE-INVENT AVIATION!!!!!!!!!!(!!!!!)

Oh, well, that's that, then

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

By your logic, probabily spot on! By mine! You`re not.

 

Who will 'WE' be to look at all this experience and how do you propose to reach a final decission on what a personal aircraft with realistic design specification should be. Who will the manufacturers be and will they want to build this perfect aircraft. Furthermore, will anyone want it?

 

Frank

 

"We" is all the dedicated experts who expound their wisdom on this forum. And anybody else who wants to thump his scooner on the bar, I suppose. With such a plethora of wisdom, surely some consensus can be found? No? Then, if nobody can agree on what they want, you can hardly blame the manufacturers for not producing it, can you?

 

Sadly, yes; you can. So you'll get what you deserve.

 

Ta Ta.

 

 

[Bandit12]

Geese Bandit! I was with you all the way until that line!....Not enough to do something! The something can be completely in the wrong direction to the objective. It`s not even enough to identify the problem! To solve the problem the correct solution needs to be found, then applied.

You probably are still with me Frank - the problem is that regulators will quite happily fire off their own solution to the end problem without being bothered with the underlying real causes. You are absolutely right that the correct solution has to be found and applied, but at the moment the problem isn't even well defined. The consequence is (people dying) but the cause isn't. Sometimes it has to start with doing something, and seeing if it makes a difference. An educated "something" for sure, but if you have to wait for a proper evidenced solution, by the time there is one, you may have been regulated out of the air......

 

Look at the HF exam - by most comments it seems have been implemented poorly. So is it under review? Is there an active ongoing process to improve it?

 

Or Bob's suggestion with regards to maintenance. Without making a judgement about whether it will dramatically improve anything (limited data to make any calls), no one can deny that improved maintenance standards won't make some difference. So do something, so that when the regulator starts breathing down the collective neck of recreational aviators, at least someone can stand up and say that we are doing A, B and C and are seeking to improve them continually.

 

 

[Oscar]

Geese Bandit! I was with you all the way until that line!....Not enough to do something! The something can be completely in the wrong direction to the objective. It`s not even enough to identify the problem! To solve the problem the correct solution needs to be found, then applied.But in order to find the correct solution, the problem needs to be properly defined. IS the problem ( i.e. lack of competence for a new type of aircraft) that is being addressed by this proposed Ops. Manual change really a high-priority problem, in terms of the serious accident cause statistics? When there used to be the Incident reports in Sport Pilot or its predecessor, I think that very much more often than not, the pilot time on type was at least in multiple hours. By comparison, turn-back serious/fatals were far over-represented and that begs the question, as always, of the necessity for at the very least spin avoidance/recovery familiarisation. There is absolutely NO substitute for the 'seat of the pants/feel of the stick' sensation of an aircraft entering an incipient spin, and (at least for any reasonably well-behaved aircraft) that is pretty consistent. A decent check-flight ought to include a power-on and power-off stall so that one is familiar with the specific aircraft - whether it falls in, flicks in, or sloughs in - but even a 'type endorsement' is no guarantee of imparting all the information, since small rigging differences can make individual aircraft behave differently. A type endorsement isn't going to overcome a fundamental lack of judgement of things like energy management in a landing if the pilot has simply learned by rote to do this and that when turning final on one type, though I grant it may alleviate the more extreme effects for change to a different type.

 

If one recalls the training regime for Spitfire pilots in WW11, it was basic airmanship in a Tiger Moth (usually), a few hours in something like a Miles Magister (if I remember correctly) - then let loose on a Spitfire! There were NO dual-training Spits around for 'type endorsement' AFAIK, so presumably 'type endorsement' was... surviving. Losses were high, but damn, the jump from a Magister to a Spitfire? That ANY survived says something for the quality of the basic 'airmanship' training and the degree to which that could be carried over.

 

By your logic, probabily spot on! By mine! You`re not.

 

Who will 'WE' be to look at all this experience and how do you propose to reach a final decission on what a personal aircraft with realistic design specification should be. Who will the manufacturers be and will they want to build this perfect aircraft. Furthermore, will anyone want it?

 

We already HAVE different standards that cater for 'basic' through to 'LSA' and beyond. I don't understand the dropping of the distinction from 'High Performance' to 'Low Performance', that seems to be a more fundamental difference than between say a Tecnam Echo and a Jab 160. Taildragger to Nosewheel? - agree. Use of VP props vs. FP props - agree. I'd absolutely include an Airbraked vs a flaps-only aircraft as a Class - not Type - above a Retractable/Fixed - that's a circuit-work consideration, not fundamentally a flight characteristics difference (unless one is sophisticated enough to use landing gear retraction/extension as part of energy management).

 

 

 

The marketplace rather says what a personal aircraft should be. The sales of Jabirus, Tecnams, Pipistrels, CT thingys, Brumbys, Foxbats et al vs. the sales of Drifters, the demise of new Thruster manufacture, the numbers of kit-build X-airs or similar - says the majority of 'small' aircraft owners want something that (roughly) fits the LSA class. The arbitrary MTOW limitation skews this a bit: if one made the standard two people, single-engined, propellor-driven daytime VFR limited to non-pressurised/oxygen use, with let's say, the capability to operate into and out of 500-metre strips at up to 3500' ASL, I think you'd encompass about 95% of people who don't really want to go GA but do want to be able to fly around in respectable safety with useful usable load.

 

 

 

Here's a question: is the realistic operational environment of a Trike vs a Low Performance 3-axis machine more similar or more different than a Low vs High Performance 3-axis machine? Should we be looking more at the characteristics of performance and the nature of the use of the machine, than the machine itself, as a basis for the regulatory and training requirements?

 

Frank

[M61A1]

Remember that it all started with the Skycraft Scout. The people who wrote the original design standards for ultralight aircraft tried to "simplify" the certification process - which was seen as the major cost factor - by omitting things from the standard. In effect, they started with the obsolete standard, CAR 3, which already lacked any requirement to calculate the safe fatigue life, or otherwise make the structure damage-tolerant, and also largely ignored any requirement to produce a maintenance manual; and took a machete to it and cut out a lot of other things - gust loads, for one. The concept was that, firstly, the things were butterflies and not likely to fly more than 100 hours per year; and secondly, that if (when) problems arose, they would be dealt with by issuing ADs; and anyway, they flew so slowly that it was not really necessary to bother calculating the gust loads. Also, those were the days when everybody did his own car maintenance. A Drifter looks like the sort of thing any handyman could build using a Wolf Cub electric drill and a hacksaw, starting with a Hills Hoist, and people felt that building aircraft had at last come into everybody's backyard capability. Fatigue life? What's that?Concepts such as designing for minimum maintenance were not even dreamed about; the attitude to even CAR 3 aircraft (such as most of the Cessnas and Pipers from the 1950s thru 1980s) was epitomised by a Piper sales rep, who gave a spruik at the NSW Royal Aero Club, on the latest version of the PA-28. When somebody pointed out that the original PA-28s the club had purchased were already showing signs of corrosion, he reply was "Gawdam, man, those airplanes are five yars ole!".

 

What has in fact been happening, ever since it progressed past the Skycraft Scout, is the re-invention of the aeroplane. The evolution from open frame, externally-braced aircraft such as the Drifter and the Thruster, to enclosed bone & rag things like the Lightwing & the Skyfox, to stressed-skin devices like the Jabiru and Tecnam, is almost an exact replica of the progression from the Wright Flier No 8 to the Cessna 172 - the differences have mainly been due to modern materials. We even had a few biplanes along the way. though they hardly made a dent in the progress.

 

Now we're starting to see the necessity of re-inventing FAR 23 - or even going a bit further, to include low-maintenance design. This is, I suppose, a natural consequence of the fact that, far from the fix-it-yourself attitude of the 1960s, we are now in the "throw-away white goods" era where people have lost the basic skills to do maintenance, and anyway can't be bothered with it.

 

The whole idea started out with the belief that "there has to be a simpler way". If you study history, this is a recurring theme; the first manifestation of it was the "Flying Flea" of Henri Mignet; the second one was Bensen's Gyrocopter; the third was the rogallo-wing hang-glider; and the fourth was the ultra-light aeroplane. They all go through much the same phases. They all have small groups of fanatics who persist with the original idea after the mainstream has moved on. They all have fundamental shortcomings; and by the time people have identified the shortcomings and addressed them, somebody else says "Hell, this is too complicated - there HAS to be a simpler way!" - and the cycle starts again, in a new guise. Overall, it does not seem particularly sensible, to me. I wonder at the overall sanity of the human race, actually.

 

The way to break out of this endless loop, if anybody actually wants to, is to do some reading; Stinton's book "The Design of the Aeroplane" is not a bad starting point. The statement "those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it" is observably correct. How about we look at all this experience, and make our minds up what we really think personal aircraft should be (and obviously that will need to be divided into several categories), and in effect present the manufacturers with a realistic design specification?

 

Or am I being altogether too logical?

So, where does that put the idea (my idea) of wanting to build something because I want to build it?

I want to build a flyin' machine out of metal (I like to work with metal), that looks very 1930's, a sort of roughly scaled F4U. I don't want to make it because it's a practical economical aircraft, I don't want to mass produce or market it, I want to make one because I've always wanted one.

 

 

[Guest Crezzi]

Here's a question: is the realistic operational environment of a Trike vs a Low Performance 3-axis machine more similar or more different than a Low vs High Performance 3-axis machine? Should we be looking more at the characteristics of performance and the nature of the use of the machine, than the machine itself, as a basis for the regulatory and training requirements?

The operational environment, performance and nature of use of a trike might be similar to a LP 3-axis but the training requirements shouldn't bet. Converting between LP & HP 3-axis is much more straightforward than converting from either to weightshift.

 

Cheers

 

John

 

 

[Bob Llewellyn]

So, where does that put the idea (my idea) of wanting to build something because I want to build it?I want to build a flyin' machine out of metal (I like to work with metal), that looks very 1930's, a sort of roughly scaled F4U. I don't want to make it because it's a practical economical aircraft, I don't want to mass produce or market it, I want to make one because I've always wanted one.

95:10 is there for YOU! And, we have a version of experimental - self education in 95:55. Read the operational categories?

 

 

[farri]

Look at the HF exam - by most comments it seems have been implemented poorly. So is it under review? Is there an active ongoing process to improve it?

Good point! so let`s look at the HF exam. I don`t know if there is an ongoing process to improve it but if the exam is still the one I did when it was first introduced, in my honest opinion, it isn`t worth the paper it`s writen on and it isn`t going to reduce the accident rate.

 

Frank.

 

 

[M61A1]

95:10 is there for YOU! And, we have a version of experimental - self education in 95:55. Read the operational categories?

Yes, I understand the current categories, I was meaning in regard to repeating things that have been done before, and design durability.

 

 

[M61A1]

Good point! so let`s look at the HF exam. I don`t know if there is an ongoing process to improve it but if the exam is still the one I did when it was first introduced, in my honest opinion, it isn`t worth the paper it`s writen on and it isn`t going to reduce the accident rate.Frank.

But they can tick a box that says we did something about that.