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On the airsickness issue, don't let it worry you - for the vast majority of people it goes away pretty quickly. Try and book your flights either early in the morning or in the late afternoon (5ish etc) when there is still plenty of daylight, but everything is cooling off a bit. You can also try taking some ginger tablets (ginger travelcalms are good - avoid blackmoore's as they have bugger all ginger) but most people prefer ginger beer. Have a bottle of a good brand (bundaberg etc) about an hour before flight. As an added bonus to the ginger beer method you get to belch in a very impressive manner, which small children can find hilarious. Extra points for singing the alphabet song while belching. If you do go with the ginger tablets take them about 40 minutes to an hour before flight to give them time to work.

Hi Lazarin, You may have covered this somewhere else, but if your only planning on learning to fly RA-Aus aircraft then you'll only need the ra-aus one. You wont need the medical, unless you have a pre-existing condition that precludes you from holding a drivers license. I'd recommend going for a few TIF flights though (if you havn't already), to get a feel for the instructors and aircraft available in your area. I think you are allowed 3 hrs of flight instruction before your required to hold a student certificate (at least for RA-AUS). I don't know the requirements for the GA route. Try and book your sessions for the early morning - december can get a little rough and bumpy during the day. Best of luck and welcome aboard.

Its a 110 zone on that highway, and we had about 8 kts of headwind wind (i think - don't have the flight plan in front of me).

Yah, but normally reginal is spelt regional not reginal... :-p I wasn't doubting that the information came from a legit source. I note the graphs you've provided are Regional Airlines an GA, where the graph TD has provided is "Private and Business Hours Flown", which may explain the difference, if they are excluding regional airlines as a business...

That graph appears to be from a very interesting government department. "Bureau of Transport & Reginal Economics" hey.

I fly in a Gazelle and absolutely love it, but its a case of horses for courses - you wouldn't want to take long distance trips in one unless you've got plenty of time. On my nav test we were flying pretty much straight along above a highway after a divert and I was proud to report to the instructor that we were slowly overtaking a motorhome. She was a little suprised, but gave a hearty cheer. The gazelle at goulburn cruises at 65-70kts, but thats without its pants on. Apparantly having all the fairings and such on improves things quite a lot. I've also flown a couple of GA aircraft (Piper Warrior and Cherokee), and yes they climb better and cruise faster but they arn't anywhere near as much FUN to fly.

well, the thing that makes me doubt the story is the well meaning farmers, if they only had their RA-AUS certs shouldn't have been in the controlled airspace. So if they were legitimately in there, then they also had PPLs.... *edit* heh... thats really quite entertaining airsick.

Its possibly true, but as Yenn said its not restricted to the type of pilot. I've heard some really bad radio calls round Goulburn - mostly from a bunch of GA students from a school that insists they wear uniforms (for Comercial training?). Similair sorts of behaviour too, such as entering and backtracking a runway when there is one plane on final and another on base for that runway. Both ended up having to go round. Then there was the guy who took off with the call "grasscutter 1 rolling on 22" to avoid having to pay his landing fee. But at least he made a call and got the runway right. As an aside note what are the most entertaining radio calls you have heard? Mine is probably: Very professional sounding: "Goulburn traffic Warrior <somerego> joining downwind for 04 Goulburn" followed shortly afterwards by an embarresed "uhhh Correction Goulburn traffic Warrior <differentrego> joining downwind for 08 Bankstown" then followed shortly again with a rather frustrated sounding "Correction Goulburn traffic Warrior <samerego as the secondtime> has joined downwind for 08 Goulburn" Unfortunately I did almost exactly the same thing on a nav about a month later

Once I moved on to slightly longer flights (navs etc) I started taking water with me. Easiest way to do this is with a camelbak or similair (I actually use an el-cheapo no-name brand - $35 for 3 litre capacity) as it can sit quite comfortably between your back and the seat. Drinking is fairly quick and easy, take a hand off the controls, stick tube in mouth and turn on the little tap. Some are even better and come with a little press valve, so all you do is stick the tube in, press it against your teeth with your lips and suck.

My instructor arranged a trip to Sydney to tour the ATC teams at both Mascot and Bankstown. As part of tour we were given a presentation on controlled airspace violations, which included video replays of the ATC system. It was quite an educational experience, and showed a number of near misses like a GA flight almost getting run down by a C130 Herc near Richmond, and a pilot following the coast all the way on Victor 1 and coming very close to an airliner inbound for landing. It also showed how ineffective switching off your transponder and flying at 50ft would be - they pick up trains and trucks travelling along highways. They also showed a plane who cut a corner of CTA, and then switched off their transponder when contacted by ATC. ATC ended up having to divert an inbound passenger to maintain seperation. Needless to say they tracked the transponderless plane all the way to their destination.

I've been up in one as a passenger in really quite nasty weather (30kts gusting 35). To be honest it felt like it was completely immune to whatever the wind etc was doing. The guys who fly them at goulburn are often up when other pilots are around, and are very friendly. They handle curious onlookers like me very well too, answering lots of questions about their airplanes.

Welcome to the forums Bob, and congratulations on your cert.

How did the TIF go Cralis?

Don't know what ICUS is - possibly In Command Under Supervision... (?) Yes, your 30 minutes counts. When you get your log book you'll need to write it in and get it signed by the instructor. Rex also has a cadetship program if you really want to go that route. I think you may need some flying experience to get into it, and you should take a really careful look at the conditions of employment before taking it up.

I think all instructors are like that. There i'd be cruising along and enjoying the ride and Teraya (the instructor at goulburn) would say something like "Wow, look at that car going round Wakefield" or "Look at the sheep all heading for the water trough". Sure enough when I looked over a car would be doing a fantastic slide around one of the corners, or the sheep would be in some interesting formation (or sliding round corners) and everything would get a lot quieter. I can only imagine the hours she spent training the sheep to form up into patterns whenever they heard the Gazelle flying overhead. I still get twitchy if I'm driving along in the car and my girlfriend says something along the "ohh look at the sheep". It was worse when she said that shortly after takeoff when I took her up for the first time after getting my passenger endorsement. Definately a "oh " moment.

I imagine the ground prices are cost for the lessons if you have them. You'll have to pay the RA-Aus membership wherever your learning. The price is $160/year which is pretty cheap. As well as your student/pilot certificate You also get a subscription to the recreational aviation australia magazine. Other includes are a logbook and the Ops and Technical manuals on CD. Personally I decided to go the self-taught approach to the theory, with lots-o-questions to the instructor as necessary. mind you I read a loooooot of material. A great starting place is the RA-Aus site, specifically the ground school (theory) section: Flight theory contents I found this generally more helpful than a lot of the other texts available. The BAK book in particular had a bunch of errors (might have just been the revision I had), but they were pretty easy to notice and quite funny sometimes. You may also find: Learn to fly helpful. When your talking to the places you probably want to find out how much a TIF (or trial instruction flight) is - its normally about 30-40 minutes long and cheaper than a normal lesson. Basically long enough to get a feel for the instructor.

Personally I found the simulators more of a hinderance than a help. They are just too unrealistic and you really don't get the same feel as you do flying a plane. You don't get the same visual stimulous either.. Your stressing too much about the turns not being co-ordinated. Just relax and have fun - it'll come in time. If you have any questions during the flight don't hesitate to ask. Make sure you talk to your instructor about what your thinking as your flying a long. talk lots so they know whats happening in your head and can help you understand/achieve your flying goals more readily. I'm with the other guys though - find an instructor that you like and can get on well with. Try TIFs at a few different schools, and maybe a couple of different planes too. Not showing you the books was kinda weird. Glad you enjoyed your first TIF.

Probably a cheaper way to do it again is to do the RA-AUS route, but doing the PPL exams. The GA exams are accepted by RA-AUS (i believe), but not the other way around. Your RA-Aus hours will count towards your PPL though Mind you for this you'd need a school which teaches both. Check with your local instructor.

wait - we are allowed to fly in clouds now? or at night? nice to see our membership fees are going towards something worthwhile.

There are a couple of options you could take beyond letter writing. Consider talking to a lawyer about the phrase "deprevation of liberty", which is in effect what Snow is doing by not allowing you out of the gate. As for the email bomb I'd suggest against it. The pollies will just stop using their email, or they'll stick some poor pleb in front of a computer with orders to filter all the crap out (because they arn't smart enough to use outlooks inbuilt filters).

After my problems with the LM335 I decided i might need a stable voltage reference for the ADC to work with. I ordered some sample voltage references from both microchip and maxim. Last night the microchip ones (mcp1541s) arrived, so i hooked one up to see how it would go. This gave a much more stable reading from the LM335, and also from variable voltage (basically a variable resistor) I was applying to another pin. Unfortunately while the variable voltage results were consistent with what I was getting from my multimeters, the LM335 was reading 3 degrees cooler than my multimeter (doh). While this error is easily corrected I'll need to do some more testing to see if its consistent. anyway, the mcp1541 seems to be the go, and at US$0.75 a pop its affordable enough for this project too.

has anybody considered inviting her to come for a flight in their ultralight? It might help her to get a better perspective on things, if she spends some time cruising around with somebody knowledgable who can describe the differences between say a 747 and a J450. It might also help her to write better articles in the future.

Well, i'm not an expert but the wiring diagram in the installation manuals look pretty good: http://www.ps-engineering.com/pm1000.shtml and click on the green install manual picture on the right hand side. You'll need to know the part number for your radio, but it should be on there somewhere. I have no idea about compatibility with any sort of radio.

Last nights coding and testing went well, though it did turn up an interesting problem with the LM335 temperature sensor. The initial run throughs went fine, with the temperature sensor reading within half a degree of my multimeter+thermocouple, and fairly close to the diode temp sensor as well. However after about 1 hour, i started to see some divergence in temperature between the three sensors which continued to worsen. At the 2 hour mark the LM335 was reading 29.5 degrees, the multimeter 19 and the diode temp sensor 21. Throughout the testing the multimeter and diode sensor remained pretty much in sync with each other, but the lm335 diverged from the other 2 just after the first hour, and the gap slowly widened. I'm not sure if this is due to a dud sensor, or something else. I'll pick up another one today and try that over the weekend. I also hope to get the thermocouples hooked up and running, though I'll use the diode sensor for the cold junction offset on the first tess.

gday Al, Unfortunately I don't use MSN - I'm pretty much constantly on the net at work (where we arn't allowed to use instant massaging), so by the time I get home I'm generally ready to leave the internet alone for a while... I'm normally pretty handy with a C compiler myself (I program a lot in my day to day work, though normally in C++). A lot of the stuff that was going wrong was too basic really to normally cause any problem. I'm reasonably certain that the compiler was borked. It just took me a while to figure that out. Certainly everything i'm doing with the new compiler (CCS) seems to work fine, and I like its integration with MPLAB better anyway. Thanks for the offer of help though - I may take you up on it if I run into further problems.