pmccarthy

No Cessna?

That was the US Avgas replacement. Not relevant to our Premium Unleaded in Rotax. But interesting.

I saw this yesterday and spoke to the builder, Petr Gregory. It is a one off, using a VW engine. Probably a better use than for aircraft.

That second seat is where you put your flight bag.

Forgot to breathe in!

These look like the same two aircraft that Flyvulcan was telling us about in 2010. That is 14 years ago!

Local 1.4 hours with my grandson today.

Midjets not Rearjets.

Have sold three, and can recommend using an agent like Light Aircraft Sales. Not expensive for the hassles avoided.

Yeah, they were in flight mode.

Memory is cheap and easy these days. A CVR could record ten or twenty hours, or a thousand, on a cheap memory stick!

Apparently it burnt slower than a metal aircraft would.

Blancolirio today suggested the dash 8 was on runway centreline and hit from behind. But it’s early days.

I sat next to a Frenchman who drank and smoked cigars all the way from Paris to Melbourne. Took days to recover.

Some people just can't get their heads around technology, or how things work. They might be smart in other ways.

I have tried 50 min and 60 min, both too far to be practical, now 20 min is just fine.

My coolant and oil temps rarely lift much above the pin, neither has ever reached the green, the gauges are not marked with temps, just coloured zones. Are the gauges wrong, or is it running cool? If I blank off part of the heat exchangers and it was the gauges, I could damage the engine.

It’s probably the hours in the last twelve months and last three months that matters when it hits the fan.

What is pump gas?

Consider Broome. They run on gas delivered by trucks. Solar will not work for four months of the year. Windmills will not survive a cyclone. Tidal, with the biggest tides in the world, is not environmentally possible. A package nuclear plant would be perfect. They have existed for nearly 70 years in submarines, with no disaster.

Ingersoll Rand made their reputation with the Class AA2 steam powered compressor, on the left. My friend Jim was the Australian manager many years ago and paid for this machine to be restored.

The following may be useful in making comparisons when machines have different expected lives. I used to teach equipment selection for mines and wrote this.

The Average Annual Cost is the sum of Depreciation, Interest and Operating Cost. Consider a truck that has an initial cost of $1.0M and a salvage value of $0.2M after an estimated four-year service life. The depreciation is thus $0.8M over four years or $0.2M per year. 

The interest expense arises, because owning an asset ties up capital. This is true whether you borrow all or part of the purchase price, or whether you use your own money. In the latter case there is an opportunity, cost because that money could have been invested elsewhere. The average investment is:

($1.0M + $0.2M) / 2 = $0.6M

If your company has a cost of capital (or cost of borrowing) of 10% per annum then the annual interest expense is 0.1 x $0.6M or $60,000 for each of the four years.

The annual operating cost may be calculated from the estimated hourly operating cost of $200 per hour (which includes operator, fuel, tyres, maintenance etc. and the cost of a major rebuild at 12,000 hours) and the expected utilisation of 5,500 hours per year, which is a total of $1.1M per year.

From the above, the Average Annual Cost is:

$0.2M + $0.06M + $1.1M = $1.36M

A similar calculation can be made for each of the trucks under consideration. The equipment selection decision can then be based on these results, together with all of the other important considerations about manufacturer's support and spares availability.

We have one Toyota hybrid and will trade it on another ordered for next year. Great performance, low fuel consumption, good resale. What's not to like?

Thirty years ago when the Golden Grove mine kicked off, they hired people with no mining experience. They were paid less, because they were less productive, but put through a multi stage training programme. Even the girls from Perth office signed up as underground miners. But as soon as each person got some experience they went elsewhere for much higher pay. The mine had a constant problem of inexperienced workers and shortage of people. So the experiment ended.

I have found my firearms licence is accepted as proof of identity with the Vic government but my ASIC is not.