marshallarts

it's been a lemon from day one!

The aircraft or the Rotax engine??

There is an Aquila A210 on planesales.com.au which is/was one of theirs - VH-OIU. Sad to hear they have shut up shop, but we might be seeing more of that.

That's pretty serious flying in PNG - high terrain, low cloud, uncooperative weather. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Scenery? Oh, you mean OUTSIDE the cockpit! Didn't notice much of that.

We use the Telstra data-only prepaid thing on a tablet, for our road trips. It's $150 per year for 40GB (was 25GB when we first started). According to the website, any unused data does NOT roll over, which annoys me no end - if I've paid for it, it should be mine regardless of when I use it. In fact it annoys me that there is an expiry date at all - I don't see why it should matter how long I take to use the data.

As far as I know that is their lowest-cost prepaid data plan that has 365-day expiry on the data. As a general rule Telstra does have the best coverage in our experience.

Thanks for that, the Wedgetail website is much better than the old (still there) Morgan one.

Ah thanks.

...built my Sierra and test flew it ...

Hi kgwilson. You say you BUILT your Sierra - so I take it that is NOT the Tecnam P2002 Sierra? Where can I find some info about your Sierra type? When I search all I find is the Tecnam.

Most of my flying was with yoke aircraft and centre throttle/mixture/prop, but I did a bit of stick time in a Skyfox (I think it was) for a tailwheel endorsement. I don't mind either, but agree with the point above that legs don't get tangled up with a yoke when getting in/out., which is a plus for yokes. I don't like the idea of a centre stick (between seats), because it can only be used with one hand and I like to be able to use either for the flight controls. I've never flown a tandem or single-seater with stick and throttle each side, but intellectually that does have some appeal. It might depend on where everything else was though, i.e. things like flaps/gear/radio switches that need regular access.

Taking off with a flat battery would be illegal.

Hmm interesting. Is that only for IFR? It brings back a memory from my aircraft ownership in a previous life - someone had hired my Debonair and it wouldn't start after they had landed at Cervantes (I think), about 100nm up the WA coast from Perth. I had to hire another plane and take my maintenance LAME up there to try to get it going. It was just a flat battery (cause was found some time later), so the LAME hand-propped it to start it (looked quite scary to me), and we got it back to Jandakot perfectly ok. Would that have been technically illegal (bearing in mind this was around 1992)? The only other option would have been to truck it back, a massively complex and expensive exercise. Even as it was it was quite costly!

Boy, if that's not a demonstration of confidence in the Lightning airframe, I don't know what is!

My old brain wouldn't allow me to let this go, so I did ask the guys at Jabiru for their comment on it. The response was that ALL their factory-built aircraft are now built for the LSA rules, so ALL factory-built aircraft have an MTOW of 600kg (or even less for some of the 2-seaters). This is despite the fact that the J230-D does indeed have the same airframe as the J430 - it is the registration that sets the MTOW, not the aircraft structure, as pointed out above - I get that bit. But what I didn't get was that Jabiru will NOT sell a factory-built J230-D as other than LSA - even if you VH-register it, they will still specify the MTOW as 600kg. Seems daft to me, but there you go! So the only way to get a J230 with an MTOW of 760kg is to build it yourself, AND VH-register it, in which case it would be in the experimental category. You might as well build a J430 and take the rear seats out if you need/want to carry stuff, not people. It seems such a waste of all that carrying capacity to me, and an incredibly convoluted way of getting to use it - but what would I know? I'm guessing that it is a lot less expensive to get something certified for the LSA rules than for the GA rules, and that's why Jabiru won't sell a "GA" J230-D that they have built. Like so many things these days, it's all about money, and covering of backsides.

Thanks for all the details above, sounds great. Happy flying!

Congratulations, great achievement. Care to post some performance figures, weights, fuel burn etc?

Thanks, clarity at last perhaps. It's still beyond me why Jabiru (and other manufacturers) don't highight this in big bold letters on their websites. I did have a quick look at the Oz register and there are a handful of J230Ds that are VH registered, so a few owners have taken that path, maybe for this very reason. There are 60 or 70 VH registered Jabirus - most are the amateur-built J430s, and the other 2-seat models. I hear what you say about maintenance, but for me I think I would be paying a LAME to look after whatever aircraft I owned, regardless of its registration.

On the Jabiru pricing and order form for the J230, the last optional item is VH registration at $2000, but there is nothing about what the implications of that are on MTOW, or anything else. So I'm still none the wiser. Maybe nobody has actually done that yet!

Well I would certainly hope so. I'm very surprised the manufacturers aren't pushing this as hard as they can - 100kg of extra useful load, or 160kg in the case of the Jabiru, is an enormous increase in the usefulness of these aircraft types. Doesn't even crack a mention on the Jabiru website - but overall it's a pretty ordinary website anyway.

SSCBD, is that your aircraft above your name, a Risen? If yes, is it the only one in Oz? Have you posted anything about it?

Well, I'd have the same question about that aircraft - if VH registered, could/would the MTOW be 700kg?

Ok thanks, that's more or less what I had thought. So if a J230 is VH registered, can it have 760kg MTOW? If not, why not?

I'm sure someone here can enlighten me on this, and apologies if it is a really dumb question, but I have not spent any flying time in the RAA world (yet).

I am somewhat bemused by the information on the Jabiru website regarding the MTOWs of their J230/J430. If I were to buy a factory-built J230, it appears the MTOW is 600kg, which I assume is because they want it to fit into RAA parameters. If I buy a J230 kit, same deal. But if I buy a J430 kit, the MTOW is suddenly 760kg. Hang on - is this not the EXACT same airframe as the J230?? Does this mean that a J430 has to be VH registered? What if I bought a factory-built J230 and wanted to VH-register it - can that even be done? If so, could it (would it) be registered with a MTOW greater than 600kg? If my assumption that the J230 and J430 are structurally identical is correct, then the 600kg MTOW is clearly not a physical limitation of the structure. So it must be a regulatory thing, but it just doesn't make much sense to me. Neither is it clear to me why there is no factory-built J430 - I would have thought that would be a very popular model. Some illumination would be welcome.

And yes, I know I could ask Jabiru about this, but I am not a potential customer so don't need to waste their time.

Happy days indeed. No, I don't think I've ever seen that one. It's a year older than our Debbie was, and its serial number is less than 100 lower. According to the Aussie register it has been owned/operated by a lady in Qld since 2017. It's unclear to me how often they update the owner/operator info on there - I know of an aircraft that was sold over here a few weeks back, but the register still shows the previous owner/operator.

Hi Yenn. Yes you are probably right, and if it happened that I became an owner again, it would almost certainly be a small/light 2-seater, nothing like dear departed Debbie - for a start, I wouldn't be very comfortable burning 50 litres/hr, even if I could afford it. I do have a look at planesales.com.au occasionally, so I know what is around. The other issue is that I am running out of time - I turned 70 a few months back, so don't even know if I could pass the medical. I'm quite fit and healthy as far as I know, and I'm sure plenty of people in their 70s are flying perfectly fine, but you don't know until you do the test I guess.

Hi Nev. Yes, possible I guess. And yes, the Deb was built like a tank - in fact I think it and the Bonanza have the same landing gear as the Baron. There was no internet in 1990, so not so easy to do thorough research back then. And it didn't help that I was probably as green as grass! But just the 23 years or so of usage could have been arduous, especially if she hadn't been hangared for a lot of that time. The problem is the metals aircraft are made of - they come from the earth, and as time passes, they want to go back to the earth! I meant to add in the initial post that despite the traumatic ending, owning our "Debbie" was a fantastic life experience, and I will always treasure it. It brought me some of the highest highs and the lowest lows of my life. If a windfall ever came my way I'd be trying to get back into flying in a heartbeat. Cheers.

Hi Steve here, just landed here by following a link - like many do I suspect. I'm a licensed pilot, but have not flown for about 25 years.

I got my PPL in 1982 flying out of Jandakot in WA, and over the next few years added endorsements for things like constant-speed prop and retractable gear, tailwheel, and night VFR. The idea of aircraft ownership was always in the back of the mind, and in 1990 we became able to consider it after selling a share in a piece of land in the country that we had almost forgotten about. I had always been very interested in the idea of building my own aircraft, but when I sat down and thought seriously about it, I decided that I'd rather be out flying than building for the next 3, 4, 5 or however many more years. So after looking around a bit, we ended up buying a lovely old (1967) Beechcraft Debonair - basically a 4-seat version of the Bonanza. Beautiful to fly with very benign and forgiving handling, and almost landed itself. It was a far better aircraft than I ever imagined owning - fast (145Kt cruise), comfortable for 4, and able to carry almost anything you could push though the baggage door. It was like sitting back and driving a big old Cadillac around.

But being an old aircraft, there were a few unwelcome surprises during the ownership that cost quite a lot of dollars - a situation that was to get far worse. By the middle of 1994 there had been some changes to our life activities and I wasn't flying as much, so decided to sell. When she was getting checked out ready for sale, corrosion was discovered - in places that were definitely NOT ok to have corrosion. It could have been repaired of course, but nobody would quote a fixed price, except to suggest that it would be very high. It would have been like signing a blank cheque, which we simply could not do, so sadly the aircraft was sold off to a place that dismantled them and sold off usable parts, at a substantial financial loss to us of course. It was a very hard life lesson, and that was me out of flying overnight. In recent years I've been watching developments in light aircraft developments, and am blown away by the capability of what is around today. When I was flying, GPS was only just beginning to be available to civil aircraft, and no privateer could afford it. Now even small LSAs have the full glass cockpit, autopilot, the works. And of course GPS is on every mobile phone and tablet as well. A different world.

I registered so I could add a comment to a thread, so I'll look in from time to time. Cheers.

There is an aircraft called the SkyArrow that is very similar to this. It's from Italy, and looks like a serious, certified product that is actually being built. Website is at SkyArrow