Jaba-who

Yeah. I must admit it’s a lottery in November. I don’t know if we can blame climate change or whatever but it’s all gone pretty out of wack this last 12 months or so. Actually, as all us old timers keep saying, it’s not out of wack now, it WAS out of wack the last decade or so. It’s now back to what it used to be every year when we were kids (40-50 years ago) You could get lucky and have good weather because it’s a bit transitional some years.

Innisfail is a pretty little town. The airport is also a nice airport. ( actual local name if you do a google search is Mundoo airport even though it’s icao name is Innisfail (YIFL) Bitumen main strip with a grass cross strip at sea level. There’s an active aero club with a bar and clubroons. It’s a bit out of town though. Trouble is it’s a good hour drive from cairns and has no easy car hire etc. none at the airport and I have to admit I’ve never hired a car in Innisfail but there might not be any at all in Innisfail.

I guess I should add. If you were going to fly up, land in Cairns and then just tourist around then fly home it would be a reasonable thing to plan but add the following: Allow for delays coming up due to weather. Come up coastal - don’t go inland - unless you plan to fly early only in the morning and be on the ground by midday-ish. And bring a well tried and durable tie down system because the airfields inland are all minimally supplied with hangars etc. mostly if you got stuck you’d be on the ground in the open with severe winds and thunderstorm. Coastal there’s less, but not zero risk. Cairns has horrendous landing fees between 10 am and 2 pm for non commercial flights ($385) but only $15 or so before and after. There are smaller regional fields west and south of cairns ( Mareeba, atherton and Innisfail) but all a bit far away ( an hours drive ) and no hire cars etc available directly from them.

Me too. We have hangar keepers insurance ( covers the public liability side and you can more or less cut and paste additional stuff as needed like other people’s aircraft if you want to rent out space etc) and building insurance ( covers just the building ) and they find us the best deal every year. Has usually been QBE but has changed to others at times.

November is a bit of a mixed bag usually. It’s possible it could be wet ( as in days or weeks of rain from an early wet season) but not very likely. Last year our wet season started in December but for maybe a decade or more has not started till February or March. November is the season of afternoon build ups - usually reasonably clear mornings but hot by late morning with thermals and turbulence. Around cairns there are frequently thunderstorms that build up about midday west of the ranges ( out as far as chillagoe and Georgetown or a bit closer in) these then track east dumping rain, localised winds and lightning as they go. Frequently they stop when the get to the ranges immediately west of cairns but can also drop down over the hills and give Cairns a thrashing. They usually hit in the mid - late afternoon. We get some nice thunderstorms into the night. Then next morning it’s clear and same thing starts again. From a flying perspective we rarely plan much in advance and we tend to do impromptu flights around based on the weather on the day etc. I don’t go west at all. Tend to stay doing coastal morning flights. It’s just too bumpy etc out west and too risky in the afternoons.

Not much point in alerting anyone else when there is no one else. But if it alerted a snoozy pilot it probably would be worth it. But it would need some form of override to avoid annoying the pilot in situations where the workload will be negatively impacted by alarms going off all the time - and you can bet what will happen. Alarm will be deactivated the time it is needed.

OK I’ve got a complex set that were made for me by an old engineer mate. I supplied the bits and a carton of beer and he built this fantastic set. Sorry haven’t got pics with me and the planes an hours drive away. I used them all the time when I shared a hangar with a EC120 helicopter. The Jabiru lived in one half of the hangar pushed in sideways from the apron. Probably way more than you want but I’ll tell you about them. Consists of two crab like devices for main wheels and just use a four castor wheeled simple metal dolly for the front wheel. The main wheel dollies were converted from car workshop versions bought from a local auto parts place but were then modified so they would fit under and not damage the spats. Consists basically of a horizontal frame holding a fixed roller and a movable roller. The movable one is moved closer to the fixed one by pumping a pedal of a hydraulic pump. You open them wide - roll it in place front and back of tyre, close the valve and pump away. The rollers come together and plane lifts off the ground about 50 mm. Repeat it on the other side. Put the front dolly in front of wheel. Lift the nose by the prop and push the dolly under by foot. All the wheels castor so it can be pushed in any direction. I can get some pics next week end if you are interested.

Can’t agree there FT - doesn’t look like it on the video. No fire till the impact of the bounce.

When I was based at Cairns airport it was horrendous. Sometimes half an hour from start up to lift off. I’d get taxi clearance and head off to the holding point and then sit there waiting waiting waiting. Heavy metal coming in, stacked up two or three off into the glide slope and others leaving. I had several times I had to shut down because of overheating while waiting and a few others where I had to turn the aircraft across the taxiway to get prevailing wind into the engine. Apart from that convenience of close to home I was very happy to move out to Atherton airport when the owners of the airport started screwing everyone on cost.

The news report says all on board were uninjured. But jeez the aircraft is completely totalled. In bits. Wings ripped off, empennage ripped off completely, fuselage on its side and nose separated. Must have been spectacular when happened.

Well that’s the big question. If the increased limits allow certified aircraft like Cessna 150s and similar to be included and in the rest of the aviation world those same aircraft have to be maintained professionally you can see that CASA will be very reluctant to have them maintained by unqualified people especially where there might be the potential for them to end up back on the GA register in the future. Same applies to the drive for CTA - you can bet they will need to be maintained same for that too.

Yep. I had an Lyco O320 for about 6 years. Flew it typical private/recreational hours (75 to 100 hours a year for a couple of years then progressively less over the succeeding years) Bores glazed and needed Flexi honing in that time due to inadequate use. Even if all else were ok I wouldn’t call that getting to TBO but apparently a lot of people do. Advertise their engine as making TBO because it still has the main original parts. but in actual fact has a few new valves, been flexihoned, maybe have a new set of rings etc.

I have had a number if times where I have heard lots of activity in the circuit etc prior to my arrival. Ive elected to stay right out of everybodies way and orbit somewhere distant and let them land and/or depart and only come in when it’s clear again. Being patient if able takes a lot of the stress out.

A mate of mine has a long EZE and when he built it he installed a pee tube. Just a bit of plastic tubing that runs done the wheel strut and I think bends a bit aft at the end. The Venturi effect caused by airspeed is enough to draw urine out rapidly. The cabin end is just plugged off till needed and then he inserts a funnel into it. Apparently no problem to use. In my Jab I just use plastic 600 ml fruit juice bottle ( wide neck one off course ?) Getting back to the original question about getting fluids in rather than out. I think the perceived need is probably in error. Even in a place as big as Oz I don’t have a need for any type of fluid dispensing device of the type being offered. When it’s smooth flying you can use any normal delivery system. We take thermos and coffee on longer flights and typically cold water or juice in a bottle if it’s too hot. When it’s too rough for normal beverages you don’t want to be drinking at all.

Yep. I was under the same impression. Blue Sky Can you give some detail as to how it was “cancelled” and when and why?

As I interpret this: There’s no control over the carby. Essentially the carby does its thing and the device uses the CHT and EGT etc to detect which cylinders have temp changes and from these deduces that the rich cylinders can be leaned by injecting air so that the temps can be adjusted to bring them all close together. Again some assumption on my part. To make the system work properly you would have to rejet the carby to make the hottest one ( presumably the leanest one) still not too lean because this system can’t make a lean one rich only drag rich ones down to match a lean one. Assumptions on my part.

Not knocking him, I’m happy for anyone to do this sort of stuff, but yep. Ive read a few stories about this type of circumnavigation and I think all of them ended up being “multipart” trips in the end due to having to stop because of seasonal bad weather in one place or other. The first book of these types of thing I read was the guy who flew the first R22 helicopter round Oz. If I recall he did part one year and finished it the next. Stopped at some point due weather which lasted for weeks and he had to go back to work etc. so came back a year or something later and picked up where he stopped. Our flying group used to do a 10 day trip somewhere across Oz every year for a decade or so in the the early 2000s and it was always a problem of juggling opposite weather pattern at opposite ends of the country.

We’ve been through these horsefeathers argument so many times I shouldn’t even respond. I promise this will be the last one ? many aircraft of many types change engines for reasons other than a failed engine. Jabiru in particular have brought out 4 generations with multiple changes within these generations. Each time they have offered upgrades ( at significant cost) or trade ins on old generations. It’s been cheaper ( or equal cost) to get a whole new engine. - I did this with my gen 2 at 550 hours when I wanted to upgrade to the new roller cams and the new recessed pistons. Exact same $ to get a new one in a box within a week or wait 3 months for the old one to be upgraded. No brainer. Have heard of flying school who rather than overhaul their engines at 1000 hrs just changed them for a new one. Prop strike - if you have a few year old engine. Instead of all the tests and X-rays upgrading to a new one is a sensible option considering how cheap they are. Its been long stated many many times that until you get the detail at every individual with an engine-airframe time discrepancy you can not draw any conclusions as to the reason for that discrepancy.

Until you present statistical evidence of that - ie that most Jab engines will be rebuilt at well under a 1000 hours - you can’t say it. I can say that it’s not correct in our flying group. We’ve had five engines over about 10 years in 3 aircraft. One of them had a single cylinder head replaced and then two were replaced because it was cheaper to replace the whole engine then to upgrade to the new pistons and roller cams. In the whole Jabiru world - I don’t know. What has been proved is there’s a wide expanse of observer bias in the aviation world. ( not just with Jabiru) where individuals get a gut feeling about something and then selectively ignore similar issues in all other brands and fixate and amplify events (or unsupported statements) involving their target. So statements like yours really do need to be backed up by some statistics before they are made else they just feed more gut feelings and generate a life of their own.

Uuhhhmmm? Che?? The figures i was quoting and which were clearly explained were reliability figures as mentioned initially. figures associated specifically with engine malfunctions as used by CASA. At no time was I, nor will I, compare the types of things you have outlined.

The Gen 4 engines are in production and have been for more than a year. You can buy one now off the shelf. They aren’t in any form of development or test phase. ( beyond the continual assessment and upgrades that all engines go through where if a problem surfaces they come up with changes. Just because it’s not the same as yours or because it was an early engine doesn’t mean it’s a test engine or they are using it as an experiment on the students of the school as trial engine.

Well actually he’s not quite as statistically out as you first surmise. If you recall CASA used figures ( dodgy I admit but they used these in their imposing restrictions and repeated the broad estimations to the senate estimate hearing. These were: 40 engine failures or major mechanical problems and this equated to 2.6 per 10000 hours of flight. Their total figures for rotax were 1.5 per 10000 hours and LyCon at 0.8. On these figures the imposed the restrictions as they stated that they considered anything over 1.0 unacceptable - but oddly did not impose any on Rotax. But when the figures were pulled out under FOI laws and were looked at it turned out that only about 12 (as best I recall) were real problems all the others were fuel issues, other non engine component failures and several were flights into controlled airspace without clearance! etc (as we are all pretty much aware) So the real jab numbers went down to approximately a third of the published numbers (12/40) so in fact it was a bit over a third of 2.6 - let’s say 0.8 or 0.9! On a par with LyCon (if the numbers were correct - which they undoubtedly were NOT Because CASA got them without them from the RAAAus without them being carefully acquired. But still they clearly were NO WHERE near the figures CASA used. Why were they believed by CASA - a huge observer bias where they happily ignored the events happening with other engines and noisily beat their chests about the jab ones. The LyCon figures are more likely to be correct being mostly GA where things are reported more accurately, but just like the Jab numbers being probably wrong so were the Rotax figuresbut CASA were happy to use them because they appeared to show Jabs in a bad light. So all up we have no correct numbers but clearly the jab figures are no where as bad as people claimed and on the figures available actually yep- they are broadly comparable to LyCons and Rotaxes.

Not sure who or what have you the idea they are testing the engines for Jabiru. Thats just bollocks.

Nah. I have to be careful and always adjectify that one. Have a number of mates ( one flying and two not) who slave at the coalface of the law so i have to be ever mindful of that. Just like I never assume all practitioners of my art are as altruistic as I am! ?? ?

Nothing is ever " at owners risk". There will always be a vulturous lawyer and an easily manipulated widow when these things go pear shaped. It's amazing how the law so easily removes all fault from the dead victim and transfers it the living - especially if the living have deep pockets or are perceived to have deep pockets.