marshallarts

Disappointing (for me) to see that the wing strut goes down to a point at the front of the entry door, not the back.  That means the strut basically bisects the field of view for both occupants. I like high-wings for the view downwards, but this is a spoiler in Cessnas and a lot of others.  It would be nice to have no struts, but if they must - quite a few modern high-wings attach the strut behind the doors, which is a lot better.  So yes, very Cessna-like, albeit undoubtedly much better performance.  But it's completely irrelevant for me, I'm not a potential builder, or buyer, of anything.

And yes rgmwa, I'm sure Vans have said that a tri-gear will happen at some stage - a competitor for the Glasair Sportsman maybe.

I wish you well with this project, but it beats me why we are still messing with carburettors in 2022.  Wouldn't it save a helluva lot of fiddling to go with a 912is?  Or even an after-market injection system.  Yes I do believe the 912is is non-trivially more expensive than the carburetted 912, but how long ago was the last production car made with carburettors?  25 years?

I was hearing on the radio a day or two ago that the very impressive RAAF Museum in Bullcreek has just taken possession of a retired British Tornado aircraft.  This is apparently a Very Big Deal - all sorts of museums around the world were in the mix to try and get this, but the RAF picked WA because of the expertise of the (volunteer) people who restore and maintain all the aircraft (they have about 40 of them!).  Approval had to be obtained from every country that operates Tornadoes, and even from the USAF because there is some US technology aboard.  So I will definitely be making a visit there soon to have a look at this, I have been to the museum before but not for many years.  One of their more notable other aircraft is one of very few remaining Lancaster bombers.  Great place for aviation tragics!

On 07/06/2022 at 7:27 PM, spacesailor said:

I used that Pyxis to find my way around Australia. It worked fine, but only gave the coordinates. 

Ah the memories....  I'm fairly sure it was a Sony Pyxis that I borrowed for my biggest-ever flight, from Perth to Broome and back, waaay back in about 1992.  Yes, it only displayed lat and long coordinates, and it went through batteries like there was no tomorrow!  It was only powered up a few times each way, just to make me feel reasonably comfortable that we were where I thought we were.  Apart from that it was paper charts and dead-reckoning, with a bit of help from VOR and ADF - never dreamed then that we would end up with more or less free GPS in our pockets.  I well remember looking out over the desert on the leg between Newman and Broome, wondering at the wisdom of what we were doing.  I was a very low-time pilot, and it is very remote out there.  But we made it (obviously), and I'd do it again in a heartbeat if the opportunity ever arose again.

I just had a closer look - checked the ownership of the listings that have just appeared.  3 of the aircraft are shown as owned by Chuck McElwee, the others (4 or so) are owned by various others.  So it is unclear what's going on, if indeed anything is going on!  But quitting even 3 aircraft is not insignificant, especially by auction.  One of the Air Australia ones - a Robin R2160 - has been for sale for quite a while, but not by auction until now.  It just seems a very large (unlikely?) coincidence that so many aircraft should come up for auction at the same time, in WA.

I was looking at planesales.com.au.   The most recent listings on there include several which were/are owned by Air Australia, and their premises are clearly visible in the backgrounds of some of the pics.  They are all (or mostly all) auctions by Grays, which struck me as a bad sign.  I'd love to be wrong, which was why I was asking if anyone had better info about this.

That doesn't look like the same Air Australia to me.  The one at Jandakot definitely did not shut down in 2012 - it has been active until quite recently.  They were mostly into pilot training I believe.

It's looking to me like Air Australia, based at Jandakot, might have closed its doors.  Lots of aircraft being auctioned at the moment, and al lot of them look like they were in the Air Australia fleet.  Anybody know anything about this?  They were there when I did my training in the 1980s, for heaven's sake.  The principal, Chuck McElwee, famously put a stricken aircraft down in someone's backyard some years ago, in a suburb near Jandakot, and survived to tell the tale.  Them wuz the days!  Sad to see another aviation business (apparently) disappearing, but I'd guess that Chuck would be well into retirement age.

The frustrating thing about satphones (like mobiles) is that plans change all the time.  I bought an iSatPhone quite a few years back, not for flying but for emergency coverage on our road trips into sometimes-remote places.  I went for the iSatPhone because at the time InmarSat had a very reasonable prepaid plan on which the credits lasted a year - or maybe even two years.  Perfect for what we wanted, i.e. hardly ever needed, but when needed, possibly needed badly!  But - after only one cycle on that plan, it was discontinued, and the longest any prepaid credits lasted after that was (I think) 30 days.  I was extremely unimpressed, so the phone sat in a cupboard for a few years until I finally sold it a while back.  Advancing age means we don't go to such remote places now anyway, so no big loss.  But just be aware that this can happen any time, with any provider.

3 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

it gets of  the ground, however the climb, even with just two on board, is anemic and it lands like a high speed brick - not impressed. 

Hence my comment about the Rotax 915iS.  It would also be interesting to see something like one of the ULPower engines on the front of a Jab.  But I note that the Vne is only 140 knots, so there may not be enough headroom to do things like this.

I guess an obvious candidate here in Oz is the Jabiru.  It has always seemed to me that the factory-built 230D is somewhat crippled by its 600kg MTOW, especially as the same airframe (I believe) is rated for 760kg if you build it yourself as a 430D.  I assume it would still be limited to 2 seats in RAA, but even with that, all that extra payload would represent a huge increase in the usefulness of that aircraft.  And if they could just bolt a Rotax 915iS onto the front...😁

I would have thought anything with MTOW=750kg would not be "cheap".  There are a couple of Liberty XLs for sale at the moment, that have MTOW very close to 760kg.  Certified aircraft, based on the Europa homebuilts, so all composite, and reasonably well equipped, reasonable performance.  I reckon they would be quite nice.  But cheap?  No, not that.  I guess this means that a homebuilt Europa would (might) be able to move to that category too.

That is a lot of fun to watch.  My TIF was in a 152, and I remember being taken aback at how flimsy it seemed - and how cramped!  But it didn't stop me - went on to log quite a few hours in the 152s before graduating to the 172s, and others.  This was in the 1980s.  Heady days.

Wow, this is fantastic.  It might be my way back into a form of flying!!

OK, I thought it might be something like that.  Those damn laws of physics - you just can't get around them!  😄

I'm throwing this in in the hope/assumption that "there is no such thing a a stupid question..."

We all know that modern ICE-powered cars have thermostatic electric fans to push or pull air though their radiators.  Given that the Rotax is a liquid-cooled engine with a radiator, is this something that could be considered in this situation?  I guess it's one more thing that could fail, and maybe a fan (or fans) could never move a big enough volume of air for an aircraft engine.  But it seems to me that it/they could make some contribution.  Just thought I'd ask.

Fantastic, thanks so much for posting that.  I watched it as soon as I saw it, and will watch it again.  Such a great story, such great minds, such great achievements.

Change of emphasis a bit, but...  Reminds me a bit of an experience I had in the UK in 2018 - before Covid changed the world.  My wife and I went to visit Bletchley Park, the now-famous place where Alan Turing and many others worked on code-breaking during WW2.  It is a fantastic experience to go there, and so much to see and take in that one day is not enough.  It totally blew our minds that up to 9000 people worked there during the war, and it was all kept totally secret until about 20 years ago.  That just could not happen these days.  Anyway, unknown to us, the day we went was a special anniversary of some sort, and dozens (maybe hundreds) of people were dressed up in 1940s clothes and/or uniforms.  The Poms love that sort of thing, as we all know!  There were fly-overs by a lovely old DC3 and a few other aircraft, and it all made the day very special indeed.  If anyone ever does get to the UK again, I'd highly recommend a visit to Bletchley Park.  And right next door is the National Museum of Computing, also a fascinating place to see.  Both my wife and I have spent a lifetime (over 50 years) working with computers, so we were especially tickled to see all sorts of machinery we had worked with in decades past.

The pic is of a statue at Bletchley honouring Alan Turing, depicted with one of the German "Enigma" machines.  Considering his achievements, Turing was treated appallingly after the war, mainly  because of his homosexuality which was in those days considered a crime.  He was hounded basically to death by the authorities.  And for those interested in trivia, the Apple logo is actually a tribute to Alan Turing - he was found dead with a poison-laced apple on the table next to the bed.  There was a bite out of the apple, just as in the logo.  In 2009 Turing was given a royal pardon for the supposed crimes of which he had been convicted, and an official apology was read in parliament by the then prime minister Gordon Brown.

On 29/08/2021 at 3:48 PM, Thruster88 said:

I recall an accident that occurred in South Australia?  with a amateur built aircraft heading east for a flyin. They had stopped overnight and re fueled. Next morning took off and did not get far, fuel exhaustion. Cant find the report.

Always visually check fuel even if it was full last night.

Yes, I've read about this one, it was in 1999.  The aircraft was VH-LWA, a Glasair 235 built by one of the Serpentine community I believe.  They refuelled and overnighted at Aldinga, and the crash occurred shortly after their departure from there the following morning.  Here's a link to the CASA report: https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/1999/aair/aair199901340/

There was fairly clear evidence that the tanks had been almost drained by thieves overnight.  An absolute tragedy - two guys lost.  It's not stated in the report, but I'd bet nobody was ever brought to account for it.
Yes, pre-flight checks must ALWAYS include verification of fuel levels.

This looks interesting, but all those cranks and levers in the middle worry me a bit.  I'm no mechanical engineer, so I wonder why the two halves of the crankshaft need to turn in opposite directions - is that to damp out vibrations, by rotating 180 degrees out of phase?  If so then maybe it's OK, but my uneducated thought is that vibration could be damped using a weighted flywheel somewhere.  Or by using two pairs of opposed pistons, arranged so that the pairs are 180 degrees our of phase - but if I've thought of that (and it works), then I'm sure Ampere Inc has too!  Happy to be corrected on any of these assumptions.

3 hours ago, John Robert said:

Aldi uses Telstra network

You have to read the small print.  I'm fairly sure that when I last looked, Aldi SIMs do not use ALL of the Telstra network.  It can be significant.

Is this the Ben Lexcen of aviation?  Mind-bending stuff.  I have to wonder where all his money comes from - he seems to have a bottomless supply!

Yes we use that one on an Android tablet, not for flying but for road trips.  The problem with any opinion on this sort of thing is that the plans change so often.  Until a few months back Telstra was offering a 180-day plan for $70 (I think) which gave something like 25 or 30GB.  It suited us well and was actually better value per GB than the 365-day plan.  Someone inside Telstra must have realised that it was too good, so it is no longer offered.  I was very annoyed by that.  But for travelling you really need a Telstra plan, because they do have the best coverage.

I quite like their approach.  I like the cantilever wing, the cavernous interior, and the robust build.  But the LSA MTOW limit is a serious limitation - maybe Vashon have designed this with an eye to a future weight increase for LSAs.  It seems like the airframe could almost certainly handle much more weight.  With a few more horsepower (Rotax 915is?) and a MTOW around 800 or 900kg, this would be very attractive - like a mini Glasair Sportsman.

3 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

But 600 kg is where you are going if AVMED gets you in the crosshairs

Well that may be true, and it might happen if it were the only choice.  But the likelihood of my getting back into flying is vanishingly small, so it will probably never be a decision that I have to make.