sfGnome

I love flying, be it as a recreational pilot or as a passenger in a big aluminium tube. One of the highlights of my life was sitting in the jump seat of a 747 landing in Frankfurt (pre 9/11 of course). But… I still occasionally find myself thinking “what if this thing goes down?”. No one is immune; just some are more susceptible than others. My beloved’s way to deal with it is to go to sleep, so I might as well be flying solo.

Putting aside questions of medical clearance and CASA, etc, does anyone have an answer for Walrus’ request?

At the risk of being shot at, I’ll (cautiously) put my head above the parapet and suggest… What if, instead of having the finish point at the airport (where the workload is the heaviest and the risk the greatest), perhaps have the finish point somewhere a few miles away. Put a series of countdown markers on successive paddocks that are easily visible from 500-1000’ AGL, and have the pilot make their finish call as they cross the last one. Observers on the ground can ascertain whether the aircraft is actually there when the call is made, and they can do so in complete safety. All the competitors will be coming from the same direction, so there’s little chance of crossing paths. The downside that I can see is that it adds yet another call on CTAF (10 mile, finish, joining crosswind & turning base). You could use a chat frequency for the finish call, but that leaves the pilot fiddling with tuning when they should be preparing for the circuit. Dunno 🤷‍♀️

What they all said, but I’d add one thing more. Make sure that you’ve practiced go-arounds from close to the ground (not touch and goes) enough times with your instructor first. I was not ready for way the plane reacted the first time I had to do a go around, and unfortunately I was solo when it happened. I had a great instructor, but that’s one thing he missed…

Some time back I was talking to one of SAAA’s technical contact points about building under SAAA oversight with an intent to register as RAA, and he was of the view that that would be no problem; that their concern was getting people building aircraft safely, not on which register it would end up. I do hope that haven’t misquoted/misinterpreted what he said.

Fair enough. What I wanted them to understand was that I didn’t want to be discussing how beautiful that landscape was or explaining what the flaps were for, but at the same time if they saw something odd, not to assume that I’d seen it too. Getting them to scan for other aircraft would be well worth adding to my standard spiel.

I’ve always told my passengers that from the point where we’re approaching the circuit, they mustn’t talk to me UNLESS they see something that worries them. So far, thankfully, none have had to do so.

The thing that staggers me (apart from how did this happen in the first place) is that the second helicopter managed to land safely. Have a look at the front of it - there is essentially no front. Presumably the rotor of the first craft took it out, but the pilot of the second managed to a) not get hit, and b) maintain control whilst presumably being in some state of shock. Planes fly themselves; helicopters don’t. S/he must have been incredibly level headed and shock resistant. Wow.

I asked this question of RAAus a short while ago. If a certificate has been issued in the past, then all that is required is to rejoin and then do the long overdue BFR. This may, of course, require refresh training! On the other hand, if no certificate has been issued, then it’s back to ab initio (with the obvious advantage of the initio not being entirely initial…).

When I was preparing for my RPC flight test, my CFI went up with me to run through all the things that we’d be doing in the test the following week. When we landed, he said “congratulations, you passed”, and we went and did the paperwork. A test is so much less pressured when you don’t know that it is a test.

My Tecnam Sierra had no carb heat either. Lovely plane, and I can’t imagine that it was omitted to save $$. It’s not like icing would not be a problem in Italy, so I can only assume that they had a design solution.

An optician told me some years back (on what basis, I don’t know) that brown is better than grey for aviation. He also suggested not having polarised in case the distortions in the windscreen or instrument faceplates cause problems. I much prefer polarised over non, so I think it would be worth finding someone you know who has polarised glasses and checking out whether there are issues with your aircraft.

Bairnsdale. Pouring & freezing (apparently 😛).

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 😳).