Gnarly Gnu

It won't happen here because CASA expressly forbids any form of public notice advertising for cost share private flights, as does the FAA.

Yep, you are being milked.

Always check average time to certificate and talk to current students before signing up.

A composites draftsman?

I ignored that Peter,. . .as I KNEW what they meant,. . .sloppy editing again by the Daily Fail. . . .

SC that is!

Some of those girls would've make the perfect wife - cook, clean and build you plane in between.

*Breakfast

Glad they are doing well, have to say there are some advantages in these lightweight houses. Don't try this with the Gnu bunker.

"

[/url]A small plane crashed into a Virginia home

and the three people on board survived with minor injuries. Middlesex County Sheriff David Bushey said the single-engine plane took off just before 9am Saturday from Hummel Field Airport in Topping, about an hour east of Richmond. Two adults and a youngster were on board the plane but no one was at the home at the time of the crash. The station reports the pilot lost control, flew between two trees, and crashed into the home in Middlesex County."

The race is on now to locate and recover other engine parts before snow falls and covers them.

Sound so sweet but very inefficient, running out of fuel would always be a worry.

I live with electric cars daily, electricity is cheap as chips in China

"

[/url]When you first sit in the cockpit

[/url]of an electric-powered airplane, you see nothing out of the ordinary.

However, touch the Start button and it strikes you immediately: an eerie silence. There is no roar, no engine vibration, just the hum of electricity and the soft whoosh of the propeller. You can converse easily with the person in the next seat, without headphones. The silence is a boon to both those in the cockpit and those on the ground below.

You rev the motor not with a throttle but a rheostat, and its high torque, available over a magnificently wide band of motor speeds, is conveyed to the propeller directly, with no power-sapping transmission. At 20 kilograms (45 pounds), the motor can be held in two hands, and it measures only 10 centimeters deep and 30 cm in diameter. An equivalent internal-combustion engine weighs about seven times as much and occupies some 120 by 90 by 90 cm. In part because of the motor’s wonderful efficiency—it turns 95 percent of its electrical energy directly into work—an hour’s flight in this electric plane consumes just US $3 worth of electricity, versus $40 worth of gasoline in a single-engine airplane. With one moving part in the electric motor, e-planes also cost less to maintain and, in the two-seater category, less to buy in the first place.

It’s the cost advantage, even more than the silent operation, that is most striking to a professional pilot. Flying is an expensive business. And, as technologists have shown time and again, if you bring down the cost of a product dramatically, you effectively create an entirely new product. Look no further than the $300 supercomputer in your pocket.

At my company, Bye Aerospace, in Englewood, Colo., we have designed and built a two-seat aircraft called the Sun Flyer that runs on electricity alone. We expect to fly the plane, with the specs described above, later this year. We designed the aircraft for the niche application of pilot training, where the inability to carry a heavy payload or fly for more than 3 hours straight is not a problem and where cost is a major factor....."

Great! Except that $3 of electricity in the US would be about $15 here (no joke, in the sad-ass mendicant state I dwell it is literally 5x the price per kWh of some US states). But as batteries improve these aircraft will look more promising, range and recharge time would be a worry at this point.

Radio navigation set to make global return as GPS backup, because cyber...

GPS killed the radio nav in 2010, but a high-def version is set to return.

Not censored here, VH I think.

You believe this by faith ergo you are every bit as religious as me. Or more so seeing as I actually choose to look for evidence.

"evolved"

Brother Gnu, less of the promotion of warfare eh?

So digital cameras are not proper cameras then...?

I was thinking a round field, like an ALA but this guy actually means like a big ring. I get the space saving part...

"

[/url]What if a runway were like a racetrack?

That's the basis of an idea called the

[/url]Endless Runway

by Dutch researcher Henk Hesselink and partners at the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) in the Netherlands, who think circular runways could help the future take flight."

[/url]

While we all love to complain about air travel, there's one annoyance few travelers even notice: Flying isn't getting faster.

In fact, cross-country flights were a little quicker 50 years ago because airlines included less scheduled time for inevitable delays.

We're used to the idea that 50 years is an eternity is technological innovation. So why aren't we flying faster than we did in 1967, before humans landed on the moon? This video from Wendover Production tackles a number of curious developments that led to this speed stagnation.

Not sure where to post this but I think a wingsuit could be called a 'microlight' or perhaps a nanolight?

This is an interesting article with comments and advice by Fraser Corsan; I learned quite a bit from it.

This is fine, there are parts of Alaska where the roads are shared. There are signs telling cars to give way to aircraft, many people keep an aircraft at home and the local streets are the taxiway.

Drones are noisy. Swarms of small weaponized bat bots could be very handy to the military for example.

[/url]

Bat wings have intrigued scientists for centuries

. And now, engineers have created “Bat Bot,” a small aircraft that mimics the flight patterns of the small, rodent-like flyers....

Earlier attempts at a bat-like flying machine failed because inventors tried to replicate the entire skeletal and muscular structure. The final devices were too heavy to fly.

So researchers at CalTech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign simplified matters by focusing on the motions of a bat wing’s base components: the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist and the tail. Their device’s wings are formed from a single super-thin membrane made of silicone. Its bones are made of carbon fibre, and its joints are 3D-printed plastic.

All of which lightens the load. Bat Bot weighs 3.3 ounces, roughly the same as a large lemon or one and a half tennis balls. The flexible wings aid aerodynamics too.

There is so much we can learn from the created world around us. Just thinking that something like a stall-spin accident would be close to impossible with the function and agility of this mechanism. On the other hand I wonder how well it would handle winds, and there is always the limitation of stored energy capacity vs weight - something that is still vastly more efficient in nature.

That's a bulk strip on the engine for starters

Very sad indeed! My condolences to the family; a dreadful thing for his children. Each of us are always but a breath away from eternity...