sain

thats just astonishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite

there are some really good vids on youtube regarding drill sharpening.

shouldn't his smilie button look like the ignore button?

well, much as I hate the press, there were actually some pretty reasonable points in there about Aircraft manufacturers being aware of major faults, and not moving to resolve them. This has resulted in needless deaths on a number of occassions with occupants burning to death after a survivable crash. I'm not sure what you can actually do to the companies in cases like that, other than make a habit of jailing their CEOs, board members and anybody within the company who was aware of the issue and didn't take action. Punitive damages that occur in the states don't seem to be having all that much impact.

interesting main article, and we'll worth a read.

It could have been more effective if AOPA had used the article's statistics against it. 45,000 deaths over 50 years = 900 deaths per year. 2013 had 347 deaths, or 553 less than what could be expected, based on the historical figures. That is clearly indicative of a significant improvement in saftey over the period. Anybody know what the GA and RA figures were like for Aus for 2013? I've got a feeling it was a particularly bad year, but not as bad as the Americans apparently had.

Reason the little ones need to be regulated: http://www.complex.com/tech/2014/04/drone-crash

pretty sure that falls under the definition of anti-competitive behaviour.

Actually thats not quite right. The gold is a reasonable conductor of electricity, but that isn't why its being used in this case. Its being used because it doesn't oxidise, corrode or otherwise react easily. Copper is a much better conductor, but it oxidises easily, which will make it break down and it wont make a good electrical contact anymore. Aluminium is also better, but it is fairly highly reactive to a number of things, which means it isn't a good choice. Stainless steel is a good conductor, and will pretty well. So basically, yeah, the gold is a bit of a waste of time. Apart from that the Recreational Flying headsets are pretty good. I've got a pair, and a pair of DC-10s. The only trouble I've had with them is with one particular intercom, which seems to hate mixed headsets - tons of static with both headsets plugged in. Unplug one and the problem went away. It apparantly had the same issue with top of the line Bose ANRs... Anyway, the Recreational Flying headset represent excellent value for money for the quality of noise reduction that you get with them. If you don't want to fork out for an ANR set, you can't really go wrong with them. *edit* whups, should have read further on in the thread - I thought Aluminium was better than gold.

The older submarine were NiFe (Nickel Iron) batteries and are alledgedly damn near immune to over/under charge problems you can run into with standard Lead Acid or the newer Lithium batteries. The downside is they are a lower voltage (1.2V i think) compared to a standard lead acid cell (2V), which means you need more of them. They also have a different discharge curve, and modern inverters will often cut off (to protect the batteries) too early for a NiFe battery. Anyway, back to the topic. The solar stuff is like anything really. Do some research yourself so you've got something to judge the amount of bullshit your getting fed by the sales droids. Have a good idea what your daily usage is like, roughly how many peak sun hours you get in your location (check BOM site for data), roughly what size you want. the size and the peak sun will give you a rough average for how many kWh a given sized system will produce every day (probably better in summer, worse in winter obviously). Check brands of panels and inverters - some are better than others.

welcome back. The forum does have an "ignore user" option, which makes the forum a lot more enjoyable. Just pick the users you want to ignore (such as turboplaner) and all you'll ever see from them is a "show ignore content" link at the bottom of each thread, and generally a bunch of other users asking them to pull their heads in. I check every month or so to see if my ignored people are making a contribution to intelligence on the internet, or have spouted anything other than drivel. If they ever manage it I'll take them off my ignore list. Hasn't happened in well over a year though, and I don't really expect it to. One thing I would like to see is how many users are ignoring me - just a number, not names. It would be an easy way to judge if my behaviour is offending and needs moderating.

good to see everybody playing nice and friendly.. Question for Oscar, who seems to know about these engines... you said 40Watt alternator in an earlier post? Isn't that a trifle on the small side? A transmitting radio is going to draw something on the order of 41Watts. Once you start adding up the fancy electronic flight instruments, the blinking lights (strobe, nav, landing), any electronic gyros, flap motors, well, a 40 Watt alternator isn't going to cut it...

It might also be a good idea to be less specific when posting on internet forums, lest you be called a "Australian aircraft and engines manufacturer" basher.

If you've got a fair bit of bending to do it might be worth rolling your own. Nice description of one over here: http://www.eaa.org/experimenter/articles/2009-05_howto_brakes.asp

For those interested in how to build and use their own manometer to conduct ASI / pitot / static testing the following link may be of use: http://www.iflyez.com/manometer.shtml

you could probably do it with a cool mint or cool fruit.... those are reasonably smooth and aerodynamic. I think i've stuffed up my maths somewhere... i'm getting roughly 39kg impulse force on the kids head from a 70km/h 5.7gram marshmellow (assumed 2cm long). Anybody know how to solve this right?

If we want to get all nerdy about it we can probably figure out the terminal velocity of various sweets, given their surface area and their drag co-efficient. Anybody know the drag co-efficient on a marshmellow? Using 0.3 (roughly the same as a bullet), 2cm^2 cross sectional area and 5.7 grams per marshmellow i get a terminal velocity of 126km/h... a drag co-efficient of 1 (roughly the same as a human) gives a terminal velocity of about 70km/h. CalcTool (here) is kind of fun when your imagining ballistic marshmellow impacts on kids heads. calculating the impact force is also fun. *must suppress evil laughter, must suppress evil laubawahahahahhahaaaaaaa*

ohhh that should be interesting..

Hi All, I've been reading through some old Blog posts by Bob Hoover (nope, not that one) and have found a lot of them full of some great yarns and loads of tips about building planes. Unfortunately Bob died a couple of years ago (back in 2010), but his family have kept the blog online. If your interested in that sort of thing head over to http://bobhooversblog.blogspot.com.au and have a read. a qoute from one of his early pieces, which I found particularly poignant given a bunch of the posts on this site recently: Build yourself an airplane. Go fly. Leave the bullshit to the bean-counters. -Bob Hoover I've also been re-reading a book called Propellerhead by Antony Woodward (over here at Amazon (kindle) ). It's about a guy who takes up flying a Thruster after noticing the effect his housemate's pilots licence has on members of the fairer sex. Anybody else read anything good that's flying related recently?

pity there was no apology for releasing our personal information to a third party.

that would be ANAO (Australian National Audit Office). Not sure if they have done one... the anao web site should have details if they have: http://www.anao.gov.au Edit: Oh, and it looks like they've done quite a few. here is one going back to 2000: http://www.anao.gov.au/Publications/Audit-Reports/1999-2000/Aviation-Safety-Compliance

I'm deeply pissed Ra-Aus gave out my names and email address to a third party, especially as my renewal was marked not to be shared.

Any chance we can get this moved to governance? Isn't it more like 4 audits over 3 years? Hardly quick anyway I think there were a number of contributing factors, that may have caused CASA senior management to ask questions and request audits. Some of the accidents we've had have highlighted some significant weaknesses in RA-Aus's oversite, which has allowed certain things to go unchallenged. Then something has goes wrong, such as an accident involving fatalities, and suddenly the serious problems are being found and highlighted by coroners and accident investigators. And then something else goes wrong, such as a crash into a stationary (sort of) object and more serious problems are found and highlighted. I'm sure many of us can think of a number of incidents that have indicated there might be compliance issues at RA-Aus. Anyway, as CASA has to answer to the Government of the day for aviation safety and it is not politically acceptable to say "she'll be right" when people have died.... they'll have called for an audit to see what is really going on. Once they've discovered problems "officially", they can't really stop until they have taken steps to ensure it gets sorted out. One of those nasty liability issues. Plus they have to explain about the progress (or at least write briefs about it) or lack there of every estimates hearing. No hidden agenda. Its all pretty simple. Now we need to show that we are good boys and girls and really can be trusted... want to bet we will ever be allowed to go back to the old situation?

Hi Mark, If your capable of doing some soldering you might want to check out Jim Weir's capacitive fuel gauge (June, July and August) on this page