Bandit12

I wouldn't be surprised if your average PPL with enough fuel (which equals time) and in good VFR conditions couldn't maintain control long enough to be talked through the process on the radio by a decent instructor. I wouldn't like to take a bet on it though. It makes for good reading/television as long as it isn't looked at too closely (like most light entertainment). I flew a B737 flight sim on an IFR night flight in choppy conditions from Melbourne to Sydney, and even under instruction, the workload was intense and my arrival wasn't pretty. But Met is right - who doesn't secretly hope for those words to be squealed!

** Insert Dislike Smilie**

That is one rugged little aircraft

....play peekaboo when Nanna is outside.....

Depends what they mean by livable. For example, Melbourne's public transport network is miles ahead of Brisbane's (have used both extensively). If you don't like the cold, Brissy is great, but if you don't like humidity, Brissy is great to avoid. Best of luck with the employment and move Ian.

.....there was nothing like a good bollocking before breakfast. **Cue Apocalypse Now music, as the Madge swoops in flying a red jackacricket** "I love the smell of a bollocking in the.....

"Reach for the Sky" - the story of Douglas Bader is an old favourite, and not just for the flying but for the sheer determination and will of the man himself. "The Dam Busters" is a great read, and is actually more the story of 617 Squadron through to the end of the war. In some ways the stories after the dam raid are more interesting. "Chickenhawk" is a very honest and raw view of flying a Huey in Vietnam, and provides a very graphic description of a man struggling to cope with PTSD afterwards. "The Cross-eyed Spitting Cobra" is the story of an Australian Navy pilot who goes off to become a mercenary pilot and is a great read. I knew the gentleman and went to school with his son, so that one was always special for me.

Great link to the concrete arrows. I'm doing a Route 66 ride in 2015 and will be riding right past the only one that is still intact (with light tower and shack) so will have to add it to the agenda and take some pictures.

....belch and an explosion of garlic laden breath "There's nothing wrong with them old ducks in the CWA, they can cook a mean.....

....3 rounds with Tubby and 3 rounds with a rather tubby looking.....

There is also some great literature about eyewitness accounts that would be useful in human factors - backing up the brain's ability to fill those gaps in what is/was being seen.

The exercise was for EMT, and in that sense it is great. I couldn't help but wonder about the "pull back to here and lock the stick" instruction for the loop though, before remembering that it wasn't instruction to do a visually correct loop per se.

I'll admit to not knowing that the profile of the wing changed with weight shift either. Learn something new every day.....

That....right there is why I choose to fly GA, and why the Alpha is my preferred (when I'm not too poor!). That surreal moment when you are spinning down and realise that what you can see was the view of many a pilot in the last few seconds/minutes of their lives. And it doesn't have to be, with some good quality instruction in spins and EMT. Really, I've never heard a good argument for the removal of spins from any training syllabus - lots of reasons, but never a good argument. Thanks for sharing Iggy, looked like a great time.

Maybe just spend your time volunteering on warbird restorations or the like. It seems like a big investment in time for a very uncertain return.

It's not a silly question, and is fair for an internet debate. It might be the case that there is an even better argument for the use of professional driver trainers rather than parents when learning to drive, and if you asked most driving instructors, they would probably agree. Learning is a fascinating thing. We learn by watching, doing, and thinking. For most of us, we have learned a lot about driving before we ever get behind the wheel. Watching what is happening, implicit learning is teaching us something, although it may also be teaching us the wrong things at times too. When we learned to walk, we watched, tried, and eventually succeeded, helped along by a little bit of evolutionary development with some of the predispositions to learning to walk built into us. So going back to the car, we have picked up a lot of what is going on implicitly, but we are not prepared evolutionarily to cope with it. Anyone who has tried to teach their teenage son/daughter about braking distance quickly realises that brains are only hardwired for speeds up to about 20km/h, and that learning to judge speed and distance required to stop takes a lot more training. Step into an aircraft, and most of us have not had the benefit of a decade of implicit learning, and most of our evolutionary processes start working against us. Speed, height, complex depth perception, moving in 3 dimensions, even multitasking is more than a little foreign. Some may have even grown up reading Biggles books or playing flight sims and have a lot of implicit learning which actually has already set some bad habits in place in terms of expectations. I had a friend who was a driving instructor, and remember him commenting on teaching people to drive. It wasn't that difficult, he said, except when you were tasked with teaching someone who had recently immigrated to this country and had not grown up around vehicles. The act of learning to turn a steering wheel and equating that to changing direction was just one thing that they didn't "get" straight away, let alone all of the other concepts. So the question of whether we need an instructor or not is very relative to the amount of implicit learning you have, and in the real world, greatly related to the potential consequences of getting it wrong. As I said, there is a really good argument for using a driving instructor rather than teaching our kids ourselves, and this is reflected (in Victoria at least) by the fact that a learner needs 120 hours in the logbook, but 10 hours with a driving school can be counted as 30 hours in the total. Without being a flying instructor, I suspect that a lot of what they are taught is how to cope with unexpected situations and to provide an environment where a student can have the opportunity to break down complex, unnatural tasks into discrete, manageable ones so that the student has the opportunity to get the learning bit done with much lower risk of it all going wrong.

Holy cow, I'm going out today to buy a few GoPros and record EVERYTHING just in case

Couldn't agree more Nev. The first time I did it was in an unusual attitudes course. No loops/rolls/stall turns needed, but rather out of balance stalls in landing configuration with lots of wing drop etc, not a nice and slow nose high stall. Recovery based on unloading the wing was an exercise in just how quickly a stall could be recovered.

It's ironic but I am not a fan of amusement park rides at all, and yet more than happy to spin. Probably just a control freak!

....he who wields the biggest whip need not have the biggest.....

Doing it in gliders would be better than not doing it at all. Doing it in powered would be more similar to what you are used to flying, and with the right aircraft you could also do accelerated spins, really unusual attitudes etc. One of my favourites was being told to recover when the airspeed was zero, and the Pitts was vertical looking at the ground. Instinctive reaction - start pulling back, straight into a stall with such low airspeed. One thing is for sure, no matter what aircraft type you choose to do it in (aside from those ones not certified for it of course), spin training and unusual attitudes recovery is money well spent.

That would be Matt Handley at Aerotec? If so, he was one of my instructors 15 years ago and I did it in his S2B at the time. Pricey compared to gliding clubs but he is a great teacher and very experienced.

....one of the faceless men of the ALP, RAA, and ABC. "What faceless ABC men?" asked Turbo, perplexed, "I know about the other faceless men, but this ABC one is new to me." "Well" replied the Lockster "it's like this. I'd prefer to leave him without a name (or face) and if I told you his real name was Madge, would you still respect me in the......

My eyes.........!!!!!

Maybe your reputation preceded you Turbs