sfGnome

Just spent the last week down around Albany. Came dressed for Perth weather. Didn’t realise how much colder Albany would be. 🥶 Still, nothing on the Gippsland temperatures that my daughter is reporting to us.

Very inventive. Now you just have to find a place to clip them when not in use. It’s just occurred to me that there is a whole generation (or two?) of car drivers who would have no idea what a choke is. Damn, that makes me feel old! 🤨

RfGuy, I enjoy reading your calculations on a myriad of subjects, but I have one really important question. When do you find the time to do your paying work? 😄 (Keep it up!)

Yep. I saw an interview with a representative of the manufacturer who said that the owner specifically requested that rego. She said words along the lines of “you know, the word means exactly the same in English, Italian and German, but he wanted it!”

Coming back from Ausfly one year, I was chatting with my passenger about nothing in particular, when another aircraft crossed our path diagonally from the rear, maybe 100ft above us. Regardless of swivelling eyes, we never could have seen it due to it’s location, so our continued existence relied on its pilots being aware of us. Out in the boonies, yes, but ADSB would have been really helpful… 😳 In that case, it wouldn’t have even needed a particularly sophisticated collision detection algorithm, but an aural warning of the location would have been great.

Unfortunately, age (be it older or younger) is a very broad brush way to classify risk. My father was as sharp as a tack until the day he died, and he would have been a totally safe driver (if only he hadn’t been blind!). My mother, on the other hand, became so unsafe that the only person who would drive with her was dad, and then only because he couldn’t see the oncoming cars… Who among us didn’t do some really dumb things when we were young and bulletproof, and every day we are one all day closer to admitting that we can no longer be safe in the air or on the ground. The one thing that we can be sure of is that in any discussion like this, it will be someone else that has to improve.

Thread drift warning! I live under the VFR lane north of Sydney, so I get to see a lot of light plane traffic. Occasionally I’ll see one travelling north in the south lane or vice versa, but the other day I saw one at couldn’t have been more than 500ft agl. Apart from being too low over a built up area, we also get a lot of choppers coming east/west at 500ft so it was heading for a mid air… 😳 Is it that hard to watch your altimeter?

Part of the problem with the fuel tanks was that when a change was mandated, a lot of commercial operators didn’t do it, so the cut-off date was delayed instead of the operators being grounded. A mate hired one of the unmodified ones, and now he’s dead.

My guess was that it was a Hercules.

Yep, you’re not seeing things (or maybe we are having simultaneous delusions! 😛). I saw it going over Silverwater, and from the height and direction I assumed it was transiting to Richmond.

I may not be representative, but I recall doing a lot of met work in my RAA training (or it seemed to be a lot at the time because it was hard). I’m happy to accept that what I was taught was entirely up to my instructor (who was also the the CFI), so there’s no guarantee that everyone is/was trained the same way. It’s also possible that what seemed like a lot to me was only one pufteenth of the required knowledge; after all, I only know what I was taught, not what I wasn’t taught. But, let’s for a moment assume (on the basis of this sample of 1) that RAA training isn’t necessarily a poor cousin of GA training, though I’m sure that there are some poor RAA (and GA) instructors out there…

It’s likely that they are grouped because it is easier to recall 2 numbers than 4. i.e. “twenty four, thirty nine” is easier to recall than “two, four, three, nine”. When I was learning (actually, failing to learn, but that’s another subject) French a few years ago, I was taught that they quote telephone numbers in two-groups and found that it was much easier to handle (even in English 😳).

What bothers me most is that I must not have been listening - or I wasn’t taught, but I suspect the former - when the topic of variation in Va with weight came up in training. What’s more, I can immediately recollect an instance, one up, stuck under the Canberra steps on a stinking hot day and getting thrown around like a rag doll where I’m pretty sure that I was going too fast for the conditions. One more cup-full out of the bag of luck, and one more into the bag of experience…

I’ve just been reading an AOPA article that gave the rough rule of thumb that for every 2% below max weight, you should reduce your manoeuvre speed by 1%. That got me thinking about the new RAAus 750kg class G. Let’s say that you want the extra load capacity because your favourite travelling companion gets a bit annoyed when you limit them to 10kg luggage in a 600kg plane, so you decide to splash out and go to the bigger class. So far, so good. However… However, most of the time, you’re not carrying a big load. In fact, you’re carrying just yourself and 30L fuel. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s imagine that amounts to 460kg, and that the published Va of the plane is 115kt. For a 600kg plane, that brings your ‘real’ Va down to 101kt, but for a 750kg plane, it drops to 92kt. That makes for pretty slow going in a supposedly fast aircraft. Now, I know that I’ve made some wild assumptions regarding the similarity of two aircraft designed for different max weights, but taking as an example ICP’s Ventura (newish big sister to the wonderful Sav) which is available in three max weights with similar specs (after taking different engine powers into account), perhaps the assumptions are not so wild after all? The question is, what’s wrong with my analysis, or is moving up to a heavier aircraft a bad idea if you mostly just tootle around?

Thanks KG. That was really interesting. With regard to the bit I’ve quoted, are they saying “don’t leave it empty”, or “don’t leave it full” (or both)? What’s the reasoning?

I’ll never forget my first EFATO practice. I knew it was coming. I’d talked through it with the instructor just before lining up. I’d practiced it in my head many times. And when he cut the throttle, I froze and did absolutely nothing. 😳

Efficiency. If you’re pulling 2A from your converter, then the old linear converter will be dissipating 14W as heat, whereas the switching regulator will dissipate in the order of 100mW. Note, though, that not all switching regulators generate high voltages. For high efficiency, they do have very sharp edges on the switching signals, but that’s easy to control with careful design (and a little bit of extra money).

Landing may be pretty easy, but I imagine that taking off on 11 would be a bit sphincter-tightening… 😝

I like it! Be even better if the lens was a fraction wider angle, but that’s being picky. p.s. like the music. 😛

I used to work for a company that was developing a radical new product and was very secretive about what it was doing. When it was finally announce to the world, it was amusing (and a little frustrating) to see lots of on-line comments to the effect that it wasn’t possible and all the images and videos were ‘obviously’ fake… 🙄 p.s. I have to add that some people put lots of money into it, but while it was good, it wasn’t the raging success that they expected so none of them have made their money back, and they’re never likely too either. Such is the way of development. 🙁

If I may permitted a small thread drift here, I noticed that no one commented one way or the other about this. Is a draughty cabin common in the Sav, or can it be easily be made breeze-free?

As any (good) engineer will tell you, it’s easy to design something, but it’s hard to think of every stupid thing that a user will try to do with it! Testing that the design works as intended is the easy bit; testing that it still works when used incorrectly takes much longer. Yes, the pilot should have tested free and full movement, but the designer had a responsibility to design for the case where the controls were left locked.

Your two crowns will be helping to pay for the S21… 😛

Yes, you’re right. The iPads without the capability to take a SIM are not adequate for running ozRunways, etc., but you don’t need to actually put a SIM in them. We used to use an iPad mini, and I never felt the need for anything bigger. I also uploaded all our checklists as PDFs into ozR as documents so that they were only a couple of taps away at all stages of flight.

…or you hotspot it off your phone. Saves paying for two SIM plans