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sfGnome

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Everything posted by sfGnome

  1. sfGnome
    Hi Red. I think that the main photo is actually a P2002 Sierra. Its canopy is different to the rest of the photos (and it says ‘Sierra’ on the tail 😛).
  2. sfGnome
    Before today, if I was to tell you about my last flight, it would have been April, 2016… Yep, as of today, I’ve taken the first step back to fully operational. Just an hour with an instructor getting comfortable in the air again and finishing with a couple of circuits. The last circuit got a bit interesting, with an RPT departing, two other lighties in the circuit, one overflying, and an emergency chopper departing as well. Let’s just say that it was a *very* wide circuit! Thankfully, the instructor said “you just fly the plane; I’ll handle the radio”. Hopefully, next week I can get the BFR ticked off. 🤞
  3. sfGnome
    Regardless of what it is, why does there appear (in the original photo) to be a large chunk missing from the fuselage just forward of the tail feathers? 🤷‍♂️
  4. sfGnome
    If you were James Bond, then yours would be a giant Union Jack… 😛
  5. sfGnome
    Stop trying to persuade me. If the plane doesn’t kill me, my beloved will! 😝
  6. sfGnome
    It was a picture of a Bleriot XI that piqued my interest in aviation. I was only about 8 at the time, but I thought “I could build that!”, and the thought has never left me. However, these days I think “where’s the roll-over protection?”, so when I build, it won’t be a Bleriot… 🫣
  7. sfGnome
    You’re brave, going shotgun. That’s ugly country down there (well, not ugly. It’s beautiful, but mighty scary in a single engined aircraft). When I used to fly from Cessnock, I’d always go up to Mudgee way before turning south, but maybe I was just taught to be a scaredy cat. I used to work with a GA pilot who couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to fly direct.
  8. sfGnome
    Good thinking, 99! I’ll bet the installation was a whole lot simpler without walls getting in the way (and you never know, you might get around to adding the walls some time in the next decade or so… 🫣)
  9. sfGnome
    How can a broken rudder cause the aircraft to bank left? The only thing I can think of (which seems unlikely) is that there was a rudder trim spring/bungee that, in the absence of rudder control, pulled it hard left. Even in a go-around situation, it still doesn’t make sense. Another alternative was that in the process of the go-around, the aircraft stalled, and the attempt to recover with the rudder failed either because the rudder was already broken, or it broke at that point. If that’s the case, then it wasn’t the broken rudder that caused the accident…
  10. sfGnome
    I lived in Europe for a number of years, and when we got back to Sydney, I couldn’t wait to leave again (hence our recent move to the Southern Highlands). My wife uses the train when she has to go to the office in central Sydney, but we use the car for anywhere else (and yes, the peak hour seems to stretch for about 4 hours both morning and evening, so the best bet is to work from home). However, if you don’t mind it being a bit colder than the rest of Sydney, then Southern Highlands has to be the nicest place to live (IMHO 🙂). Oh, and ignore the cane toads and their obsession with rugby league. The heat fries their brains. Everybody knows that the Swans are the team to follow… 😛
  11. sfGnome
    Depends on what you mean by “switched over”. If you maintain the PPL alongside the PC, then yes. If you forego the PPL, then no. 😕
  12. sfGnome
    That’s one of the things that really surprised me when I started taking passengers. Some couldn’t wait to get on board, while others were not so sure. One niece declared “it’s so tiny; no way I’d go near that”. I’d always assumed that everyone was obsessed with flying… 🤷‍♂️ The memory that really niggles at me was that we had a low wing plane, and both my parents were too weak to be able to climb in. If only we’d had a high wing. Mum would have been out of her skull with excitement. Her brothers flew gliders before the war, and she was so proud that I was flying too. Hmmmm…. I think I’ve taken thread drift to a new level. Sorry! 🙄
  13. sfGnome
    Well, he’s a braver man than I. How do you abort a takeoff on that strip? 😳
  14. sfGnome
    Particularly when she spent most of the time looking at the camera and not at the work. I did wonder whether they fitted 500 grit sandpaper while she was doing it so that she couldn’t mess it up. Very impressed by the owner/craftswoman though.
  15. sfGnome
    Well, I did what I should have done in the first place and looked at the Rotax doco. The installation manual says to do the test run accordance with the operators manual, and that says nothing about first runs, just the normal preflight test. So, it appears that Rotax doesn’t require any specific run-in. I guess that Europa’s 2 hour test run instruction is just to find all the normal infant-mortality problems (like poorly fitted pipes and chaffed cables, etc) while you’re still on the ground.
  16. sfGnome
    I remember my dad treating his new Holden that way. Bit tough to replicate in an aircraft through. Thanks a lot to taxiing! 😝
  17. sfGnome
    That’s possibly where my confusion arose. I read Kitplanes a lot, and they tend to be Ly/Cons focussed. I’ll admit to being a bit worried about that before I asked the question. 🤨 Yep, you’re right. I should have said Rotax. Perhaps I should have just looked at what Rotax say about it…
  18. sfGnome
    I was under the impression from previous reading (that I can’t lay my hands on readily) that engine run-in should be done in the air so that temperatures can be kept within limits wile running at the required speeds for the required period. This, of course, implies little engine running before an aircraft’s first flight. However, I was just reading the Europa owners handbook and found the following statement. “Before first flight, you will have needed to run the engine for a minimum of 2 hours without any problems”. Am I mixing up different requirements for air and water cooled engines (the Europa is water cooled), or am I mistaken about running in in the air, or what? Can anyone shed light on this issue?
  19. sfGnome
    I created an equivalent (presumably) to the W&B calculators in the EFBs (they didn’t have them back then as far as we knew) for the Tecnam so that every flight was automatically checked (and printed complete with calculations in case we were ramp-checked). We also checked that all extremes of us 3 pilots, passenger, fuel and load stayed within the envelope, so it wasn’t a major concern. Then again, as we were only RA, we apparently weren’t taught well enough to know what we were doing… 🤨
  20. sfGnome
    I created a PDF of our checklists and added them to the ‘documents’ section of OzRunways so they were always one tap away, and I made it a habit to always consult them at each phase of flight (this after I once forgot to set flaps prior to take-off fully loaded from Polo Flats (Cooma) on a warm day - could have been a disaster if I’d pushed the initial climb).
  21. sfGnome
    What they all said. I learned on a Jab with a centre stick, and it became a problem when I got to cross country because I wanted to write with my right hand, and had to fly with it too. Getting into the Tecnam with dual sticks was such a relief because I could fly either hand depending on the requirements.
  22. sfGnome
    I have thought about this so many times (though never enough to actually do anything about it). 360 deg cameras mounted above and below, with video interpretation by computer that is looking for anything moving against the fixed background. Yes, the background is moving, but it is (relatively) easy for the computer to correlate the image from one frame to the next so that any variation is obvious (to the computer). The point of this is to be alerted to the non-ADSB, non-radio (or choose to non-broadcast) aircraft in circuit, or (as has happened to me) the very rare coincidence of flight paths in the wide blue yonder. I should note that obviously an aircraft on exact collision course will not move against the background, but it will at least increase in size. If that is enough to give enough warning, I don’t know - I guess that depends on the camera resolution - but it’s still an intriguing thought project to play with in the wee small hours when sleep alludes me. 🙄
  23. sfGnome
    I recall reading somewhere about how the seat must be made from different densities of foam to protect your spine in the case of a very hard landing or, worse still, crash. I recall any details (on account of me not thinking that I’d be making my own seats), but is that what all the various colours are in your picture?
  24. sfGnome
    That is really neat. I’ll have to remember that.
  25. sfGnome
    Ok, definitely not differential drive, so it’s not that. I’ll apologise in advance for asking, but the squelch isn’t turned up, is it? Failing that, the next steps I’d take (and it all gets a bit painful from here) is to buzz not just that the right things are connected, but also that nothing wrong is connected (ie no shorts to other signals). That takes a while because a) there a lot of possible combinations, and b) because you aren’t expecting to get a buzz, you have to be really careful that you’re actually making connection with your tester to the signals that you’re buzzing. take the switch out of the circuit again - ie take it back to exactly as per the schematic with only one radio and see what happens then. If none of that shows up anything, then we’re into poltergeist territory… 😳
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