dutchroll

I said....... "......I don't like your chances......" Blind freddy could see that I was stating this as an opinion, not a fact. I'm always open to being pleasantly surprised, or even disappointed, when my opinions are wrong (as they sometimes are). Rec flying is not high on the radar of most politicians, especially ones who seem to be preoccupied with other issues.

Unless there's a sudden influx of Muslim recreational pilots, I don't like your chances of her giving a tinker's cuss about private flying in Australia.

Not how the referral system works, and it is not governed by CASA, but by the Health Insurance Act 1973. Also Medicare billing is intricately bound into the referral system. Avmed are not the referring doctor, they are the administrators. They did not examine you. They are simply requiring a specialist opinion. Your DAME may not even think you actually need one. Your DAME might think Avmed are being precious, or clueless, or ridiculous, or whatever (many do). Your specialist might totally agree with your DAME. Avmed are just saying "we demand a specialist opinion" (for better or worse) but Avmed aren't involved in providing the medical examination service so they have nothing to do with writing referrals. It would be pointless for Avmed to provide a referral. As far as referrals go, you don't technically need one to see a specialist. However you cannot claim anything from Medicare if you don't have one (the main reason for them), and referrals are a bit like a short "briefing" for the specialist about your case from your examining doctor. In any case, getting a specialist referral shouldn't take an hour of your GP's time. A standard consult should be plenty. The bit about expecting medical services for free is because you seemed to be complaining about the cost and you pondered whether a referral could be done over the phone or by email. By default, anything done by phone or email from a doctor regarding provision of services to you is free. They're not like lawyers. They cannot charge anything for a phone call or an email. If you have a mate or relative who is a doctor, they might well write a referral for you from a phone call. If they do that, they're doing it for free. None of this should be interpreted as a defence of CASA Avmed. I personally think they totally jumped the shark when the former avmed director was there, and a lot of doctors do too. Edit.... no it's not a cognitive bias. It's just that you didn't seem to understand what referrals are all about, nor what the relative roles are (Avmed department versus DAME/GP).

I showed this statement to my wife, currently a specialist doctor and formerly an aviation medicine doctor and a GP. She stated "I wouldn't even dignify that with a response". So I'm going to write one anyway. The reason she has said this, is because it shows no understanding of the practice costs to DAMEs. They do not do it for the money. DAMEs would be far, far better off seeing a two or three "normal" everyday patients in that time. Then they wouldn't need the extra equipment to do the aviation medicals, wouldn't need to screw around with constant resubmission requirements and changes directed by CASA, wouldn't need to pay the practice nurse who has to do all the ancillary testing for aviation medicals, and so on. My wife knows an anaesthetist who is a DAME. You honestly and truly believe an anaesthetist does DAME work for the money? Lol! Her response to this statement was: "Why is there a community expectation that a doctor should work for free?"

There's a bunch of fake video warning signs: - very casual commentary - some unusual smoothness in the video but then later quite deliberate jittery shots - fairly unnatural focusing (yeah autofocusing can jump around a bit but not like this) - nobody runs over to him at the end - freezing the video at the closest views of the aircraft it seems to look quite unnatural compared to a full size real one - it moves somewhat unnaturally for a full scale aircraft in parts of the video My guess - a heavily edited video possibly using a scale model for most of it.

That video, and the aircraft itself, looks very....ahem.... "unnatural". But quite well compiled, I must say, and would've taken some serious CPU power.

But are they necessarily? When you're an airline employee, you have paid sick leave available. My accumulated balance is currently over 6 months. Some guys have 12 months accumulated. Costs me only the meal allowances to call in sick for a day, or a week, or a month. Also we have a company loss-of-licence insurance policy. That may not be the case with all companies, but it is with some.

Hopefully it won't be too long before I, as an ATPL holder flying high capacity jet transports, can self-certify my medical category and do away with the CASA medical too. Our risk is quantifiably less as we fly with two equally qualified pilots at the controls, as well as statistically flying thousands more hours per year without incapacitation events. There's not been an accident in high capacity air transport where pilot medical incapacitation (excluding hypoxia due to pilot error) was a suspected factor for at least 40 years as far as I know. You would all fully support this position of course, as it is based on the same argument used by AOPA and RA-Aus to reduce the medical certification burden on private pilots.

I would've thought the 5 knots tailwind would explain the longer than normal takeoff roll. Just a few knots tailwind can extend your takeoff ground roll significantly (for only 5 knots, by 20% or more depending on the aircraft). It also reduces your climb angle.

You can actually ask for a small lateral offset (2nm would likely be sufficient) to avoid wake turbulence from an aircraft above and in front of you on the same route if you're getting bumped around by it. It's just like asking for a weather deviation. In Australian Oceanic controlled airspace you can offset up to 2nm right without a clearance at cruise altitude, though the aircraft must have automatic route offset capability in its navigation system (which most modern FMCs do) and if you're radar or ADSB identified you have to inform ATC you're doing it. Some other countries don't allow this though, so you have to be careful when you're crossing FIR boundaries.

This is true, but you really can get some very high rates of descent with loss of control/upset recovery in a jet at high altitude, depending on the scenario. In documented jet upset recovery cases, height loss of more than 10,000 ft is not uncommon at all. Sometimes much greater.

You can get wake turbulence under the right conditions with 2000ft separation too. Also ATC are generally pretty good at issuing wake turbulence cautions where aircraft of greatly different size pass close to each other. The A380 is particularly problematic, hence its "super" callsign suffix which was specially created for it because it can't fit into the wake turbulence category of "heavy"! Pilot's just need to be really aware of it, especially in the vicinity of an A380.

Only if you have an engine failure after takeoff, or are slow with high power set on the operating engine. On descent or clean at high speed, not a problem. Normal circuit for 16R in Sydney is a right-hand circuit due to the parallel runway operations. If as shown above he did a left circuit for 16R, then it would only be because he specifically asked for it.

Yeah I wondered that too, but I'm puzzled as to why they would start disassembling the prime piece of evidence before moving it into a hangar and doing it properly. It's not going to make the investigation proceed any quicker and all it would do is risk dropping bits of evidence into muddy grass. And why are there at least two washers left on? Surely you'd do nut, washer, nut, washer, etc, bagging them as you go. Also why would you allow journos in for photographs while you were in the middle of removing this vital evidence? I'm confused...... Don't forget propellers on larger aircraft are electrically de-iced. The blades at least, and often the spinner too.

Looks like there's one nut still on the stud holding the prop flange on? Bit hard to tell from the photo whether the threads on the others have been stripped or not. That's a puzzling photo actually.

Not necessarily. It depends if the propeller has a single acting pitch control mechanism (PCM) or a double acting PCM and whether the blades are counter-weighted or not. The natural tendency of a propeller blade is to want to drive towards fine pitch due to centrifugal twisting moment. Aerodynamic twisting moment is a lesser force and drives it towards coarse pitch when driven by the engine, but fine pitch (due to drag) when windmilling. Counterweights, when fitted, produce a twisting moment towards coarse pitch. The Hamilton Standard 54H60 propeller used on the older models of C130 for example did not have counterweights. Feathering required oil pressure ported to the increase pitch side. The safety mechanism for propellers of this design is called a "pitch lock" mechanism. This prevents the pitch fining off with loss of oil pressure. Also those propellers, like many large props, do not use engine oil. They use their own oil supply and have electrical auxiliary feathering pumps which can be manually actuated if the propeller fails to feather. The Saab normally has Dowty propellers I think, and Dowty tend to use counterweighted designs as far as I know (the newer C130J Hercules has Dowty propellers and they are counterweighted). So in the case of the Saab the default position without oil pressure might well be feather, but that's not necessarily the case for all aircraft.

My understanding is that it came off as, or very shortly after, he feathered it for an engine problem and in the photo of the prop in bushland the blades are clearly in the feathered position. The last thing he would've thought of as they realised it had detached would be marking the position. When I was test flying a C130 in the Richmond training area one day, we were re-starting an engine we had shutdown & feathered as part of the test. As I held the lever in "airstart" to unfeather it something malfunctioned and it decoupled from the reduction gearbox with the blades at a fine angle and being driven by the airflow, resulting in a huge overspeed off the tach scale. The noise and vibration was horrendous though there was very little yaw. We fair crapped our pants as we thought it was going to tear itself off the wing. If it had, I doubt any of us would've thought to pinpoint the exact position. Even if we did, what are the ballistics of a detached spinning propeller travelling forward at 3 or 4 nm per minute while falling under gravity from 6000 or 7000 ft?

Yeah crime scene powers basically allow the cops to stop Rec Flying Forum members sneaking in and taking souvenirs like prop blades or the spinner for their pool room. Not unreasonable.

Yeah we don't refer to them as "east" and "west" anyway. It's just "the main runway" and "the parallel", or occasionally "the cross runway". Gotta remember - even airline pilots' minds are simple!

Yeah I was hoping no-one would notice given that the discovery was made after the edit time had passed. But you've blown my cover!

Bored teenager in a hacking group wanting a challenge. There's absolutely nothing of any material value on the site as far I can tell. But remember, outside of the big boys in the professional international intelligence community, a lot of hackers do it for kicks. It's vandalism and it's the computer nerd equivalent of spray-painting a train, or kicking over someone's letterbox. They do it to get "respect" in their hacking group and show how cool they are.

It is a bit of a crude mix from a scanner going through multiple frequencies by the sounds of it. I hear both frequencies of Sydney Tower. The female ATC is clearing Lan Chile to lineup 16L and instructing others to taxi via Tango and Lima which means it's Sydney Tower West 124.7 (16L/34R). The first male ATC is working Sydney Tower East 120.5 (16R/34L). There's another male ATC later which is Sydney Approach. The initial Rex call you hear on this tape is to Sydney Approach. he then talks about handing over to Sydney Director. You've got a swag of frequencies for Sydney - normally divided into the eastern (main) runway which is 16R/34L and the western ("third") runway which is 16L/34R. Though if things are quiet they sometimes combine certain frequencies. The arrival sequence is: 1) Melbourne Centre on descent 2) Handoff to Sydney Approach from around 15000ft or so (never paid much attention to exactly when actually!) up to initial turn on downwind (different frequencies for east & west runways) 3) Handoff to Sydney Director for vectors for downwind, base and final intercept (different frequencies for east & west runways) 4) Handoff to Sydney Tower on final approach (different frequencies for east & west runways) 5) Sydney Ground vacating (different frequencies for domestic & international)

I actually logged in today just before you took it offline and was greeted by a flash-screen stating "hacked by ............" followed by a message that all files on the site would be deleted. It was only up for a couple of seconds (I couldn't screenshot it in time) and then had no access. I figured the site had either crashed entirely or been taken offline. Glad it's not too bad!

So.....people are still killed in car accidents through not wearing a seatbelt, therefore seatbelt laws are ineffective? By logical extension, does it mean that anyone killed disobeying a law or rule demonstrates the ineffectivity of that law or rule? My head is spinning....

My implication is that these things (wings coming off, propellers coming off, engines coming off) are almost always traced back to human error, not a one-in-a-billion material failure.