Bandit12

Thanks David - I thought it was time for a change, and everyone in my house are Snoopy fans so I thought it would suit!

Great work, you will remember that flight for a long time to come, long after the details of many other flights have blurred.

Complex question Pete, and probably not suited to a drawn out answer in the humour thread, so I'll PM you. Like your better half, I struggled with that through my first few years of training too so I can relate.

Not just a lawyer - as a psych, I also wonder whether anyone could really give informed consent for ECT. At least it is very rarely used these days, and as far as I know, almost never in Australia.

A couple of years ago, I did an assessment for a boy with social difficulties and what his parents described as quite concerning depressive behaviour. The family was from the UK and had only lived in Australia for a couple of years. One of the assessments confirmed the high levels of depressive behaviours, and so I started wondering about things like cultural differences in expected behaviour and whether the test was even valid given that they came from the UK. And then I found this: http://www.utne.com/2005-01-01/NotDepressedJustBritish.aspx Now I can't verify whether it is indeed true or just a web hoax, but it did make me laugh! Postnote: Everything worked out for the boy, and I didn't actually suggest to him that his problem was that he was British!

......worst case of piles you can even imagine. The dribble around the table was nothing compared to the dribble that came out of my ahlockshole when I finally made it to the loo after a quick suppository. "You call that piles?" exclaimed the Rat, "well, you never heard my story about the time I stayed at Turbo's beach house and he treated me to one of his famous.......

If you read US forums like http://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/forum.php generally there is quite a bit of concern and bordering on criticism of builders who want to test fly their own aircraft. Of course, it is very much a case by case situation, and those that are very current on similar types generally attract no critics and those that design and build their own single seat part 103 ultralight and seek to test it - sometimes with no flying experience at all - tend to cop a lot more criticism. And rightly so, given that it is lives and potentially everyone else's hobby that are at risk. Personally, I hope to build my own and also test fly it one day. But I would also be planning to get quite a bit of time on similar types and plenty of recency before actually doing it.

Maybe ask Ian if you can put the articles up as resources on the site? It would be a good way of ensuring that the information can't get lost and is readily available.

We wait with baited breath...... Have you and the other party looked at the market for a biplane? Personally I love them and would have little difficulty spending the rest of aviating days in only biplanes, but that may not be to everybody's taste. I can see from the point of view of the folding tail/trailer option the necessity of the bipe, but is there a big enough market for one? This was probably mentioned before, but my mind is like a sieve most days.....

We are waiting for the invite to your new social group to continue the discussion HITC!

It is certainly doable Paul....but teasing out the raw data from our rather challenging government publications is what makes it difficult. And realistically I would need to do at least 10 years to make meaningful comparisons. From a statistical point of view, our small population works against us in being very specific with the data, but it is certainly a possibility. Now if RA-Aus was to make available some sort of data base with every bit of information they have collected about accidents, I'd be more than happy to write a similar article. PS don't feel it is painfully obvious either, in actual fact the reasons are often painfully obscured. We can always anecdotally look at recent accidents and say "there seems to be some issue with loss of control in turns" and this can be useful at least personally to remind us all to have a look at our own flying skills and habits. But to look at the big picture, there just hasn't been enough detail. Couldn't agree more Phil. You have a gift for summarising eloquently and succinctly. Welcome to the forum Chocks! Thanks for the figures, they make for an interesting comparison. Ignoring the heavies and commercial stuff, flingwings, gliders and gyros, you have a microlight (most comparable to our RA-Aus aircraft) fatality rate equal to our GA rate, which is significantly lower than ours. Interestingly, your "Small conventional non-pubic transport" group rate (probably comparable to our GA) is many times higher. I suspect that it includes airwork, charter, agriculture etc, which doesn't really make it as comparable to the figures I posted. So this is another thing that could be considered - why is the accident rate for UK microlights similar to our GA rate, and significantly less that our RA-Aus rate? What are the differences that may account for some of it, and how can they be improved?

www.recreationalwinos.com

I'm no RA-Aus basher, but from the stats I put up earlier, there is only a 1.5% chance that the difference in fatality rates between comparable GA activites and RA-Aus is due to normal, random variation. It is more than appearing to be a problem. I don't know if I would necessarily say there is a huge problem (at 4.6 fatalities per 100K flying hours) but there is always room for improvement. I'm not sure I agree with the gene pool suggestion as there really isn't any evidence for it but everything needs to be considered I guess. Personally I would be looking at what GA does or has that RA-Aus doesn't or hasn't first than go down the route of a biological difference explanation.

You are doing wonders for my self-esteem Turbs

GA8 Airvan?

Both GA and RA-Aus hours flown figures are self reported, so both open to error.

Always a possibility FT, but the stats above are for fatalities and hours flown (nothing to do with no. of pilots). I'm sure the fatalities are correct, and who knows how accurate the hours flown figures are.

calculate the odds of a successful tryst with Mandy, the alter ego of Andy, who only comes out on......

For those that were interested in the statistics, I have run a quick analysis based on John Brandon's article that Sue posted the link to. I can make no claim for how accurate his figures are (mistakes are easily made) as I didn't go to the source documents to spend the time to pull out the raw data myself, but there is no reason to suspect that he has any errors. Above is John's data. After checking that the data met the required assumptions, a z-score, or standardised score, was calculated for each. The graph below shows the distribution of standard scores in a box plot. Interestingly, there were no extreme scores, or as Sunfish explained, no scores which were more than 2 or 3 standard deviations from the mean. Essentially it suggests that over roughly the last decade, no year has been significantly better or worse statistically than what would be expected by chance. Of course, this doesn't cover 2012 or 2013, and the 2011 data is estimated rather than actual, but it does show the trend of nothing better or worse than normally expected (Edit: please ignore the date error in the heading below, it should have been 2011) What does this mean for us? Well, we can't make a judgement on what has happened over the last year without a significant amount of guesswork, and that is fraught with statistical danger. It appears that we aren't seeing anything particularly out of the ordinary, and there doesn't seem to be an upwards trend by any means. This of course is little comfort to those who have lost loved ones or friends, and there is still considerable room for improvement. Consider another example drawn from John's graph - is there a significant difference between GA and RA-Aus deaths per 100k flying hours? While the sample size is small, and not all of the assumptions for analysis could be met, RA-Aus average fatality rates (4.6/100K hours) were significantly higher than GA fatality rates (2.02/100K hours; only training, private and business hours included), and the effect size was very large (Eta squared = .32). What this means is that there is only about a 1.5% probability that the differences in rates is due to chance. Unfortunately, there is so much useful information that could be derived statistically if the raw data was available. Is the fatality rate due to differences in training? Can't answer that, because there is no data. Is it due to crash survivability (ie perhaps accidents are happening at close to comparable rates but are more survivable in a GA aircraft)? Is it differences in maintenance? There are so many questions that could be addressed if it wasn't for the lack of information. If ever there was a time for RA-Aus to step up to the plate and start investigating accidents thoroughly (fatal or not), and collating real information which can be used to look for some of the causes, now is the time. If anyone is really keen, the statistical analyses are attached as a pdf for your reading pleasure. OUTPUT.pdf OUTPUT.pdf OUTPUT.pdf

I have had a look at the Aerodrome aircraft, but it has been a while. What I really wanted to do was get the Jim Kiger (Replicraft) Pup plans, and whatever else I could find, and build close to original. I've read of Rotec powered Pup replicas and they seem to suit well. Too many things to do, so little time to do it in!

I grew up on Biggles books, so I must admit to being very partial to WWI fighters also. For me the biggest stumbling block to building a replica would have to be lack of a suitable engine, although I think there are short runs of Gnome rotarys done very occasionally. TVAL have a great website, I would be trying to visit them if a trip to NZ is planned.

I was planning to take the family to Wanaka next year for the show. The line up for Classic Fighters looks pretty good, especially the 7 Fokker Triplanes in formation!

Personally I worry about "stick position" as a measure of impending stall. I know that simple examples are needed when a student is brand new and trying to cope with far too much information, but dropping your eyes to the stick (or yoke) to try and work out where it is at would surely distract your attention from "out there" where it might be really needed.

Very sad news - it seems like there have been far too many familiar names over the last couple of years. Condolences to his family.

Nothing beats doing lots of stalls in lots of different configurations (and at least incipent spins), and training to recover instinctively.