dutchroll

It's very hard to explain to your wife that you don't operate your plane like some other pilots operate theirs. Then you have to tell them why, and what it means. Then they ask "so why do they do that stuff or make those decisions and take those risks?" and you finally get to the point of saying "I have no idea". Been through that conversational sequence a number of times.

Yeah mine was nervous about flying in the Model 12 in the first place. After the recent accident, she won't go near it.

In my company, yes. In some other companies, not particularly. It depends. The salary range for a pilot employed doing RPT for an airline varies hugely from one company to another (and even from one aircraft type to another within the same company).

The regulatory hoop-jumping is provided free of charge, as evidenced by the fact that when still more hoops are presented to jump through, the pay rate doesn't change! ;)

Other commenters here are on the right track. The regulatory regime is a consequence, not a cause. I'd even agree that it's an adverse consequence. I'd also agree that, by and large, it's not always a good answer to reducing accident rates. Talk about regulation, my licence (which must be up to date by regulation) and annual medical (which must be up to date by regulation) must be produced (by regulation) at each and every simulator check (which are regulatory requirements) 4 times per year (by regulation), and also on every annual Line/Route Check (required by regulation) to be inspected by a Check and Training Captain (endorsed by regulation) who must thumb through it and check on each occasion that I still have my type endorsement (by regulation) printed in it, my instrument rating (by regulation) printed in it, the appropriate navaid endorsements (by regulation) printed in it, the appropriate aircraft characteristic endorsements (by regulation) printed in it, that it is signed by me (required by regulation), that I have the appropriate ICAO language proficiency endorsement (by regulation), that my medical is valid (by regulation) and it is signed and stamped by a DAME (by regulation). That is only the licence check! We haven't even started in the simulator yet. By the letter of the law, if I don't pass the licence check, I can't pass the simulator session and I am taken offline, no matter how much Chuck Yeager prowess I might demonstrate that day!

You reckon reducing the number of regulations will improve the accident rate? Perhaps indeed there are too many regulations and don't for a minute think that I am advocating more (I am not). But consider this: I fly for a major airline in my day job. We have the bejeezus regulated out of us. Honestly, if you wanted to know the hoops I have to jump through every year it would make you cry. On my company iPad there are 30 procedural, technical and regulatory publications (the longest of which is 2,200 pages and takes up nearly 80 MB of memory in a compressed PDF format) excluding CARs and CAOs which I am required to have an in-depth knowledge of. Yet our accident rate over several decades is almost zero. How then, is an accident rate linked to "regulation saturation"? Seriously, you don't understand how lucky you are when it comes to freedom from regulation - it actually feels quite liberating for me to hop in my little Experimental plane on the weekend and go for a private fly. Yet still you fall out of the sky at somewhat alarming rates. Why?

USA versus Canada. Chalk and cheese! But if you're in the northern USA, Seattle is one of the nicer places to go. Summer particularly, or if you like skiing only a couple of hours drive away, winter too. San Francisco and Boston are my other picks.

Ok well you are right smack in the middle of the main Seafair weekend. If you haven't seen it already, here is the lineup for Saturday 1 August. Bonus - you can get to see the Flying Heritage Collection actually flying rather than in the museum hangar! SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 8:30 a.m. - Gates Open 10:25 a.m. - Air National Guard, John Klatt MX-S and Team Oracle Presents Sean D. Tucker 10:35 a.m. - Flying Heritage Collection Sortie Noon - Lear 24 Jet 12:10 p.m. - Breitling Jet Team 12:30 p.m. - Boeing Seafair Air Show Pilot Autograph Session 12:40 p.m. - U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor 1 p.m. - Flying Heritage Collection 1:15 p.m. - U.S. Marine Harrier Jet AV-8A 1:30 p.m. - U.S. Navy Blue Angels C-130 Fat Albert 1:40 p.m. - U.S. Navy Blue Angels 3:25 p.m. - Team Oracle Presents Sean D. Tucker 3:40 p.m. - Air National Guard, John Klatt MX-S 3:55 p.m. - Embry-Riddle, Matt Chapman Eagle 580 4:10 p.m. - U.S. Air Force C-17 6:30 p.m. - Gates Close

Oh crap. What day are you there? It's Seattle Seafair at the moment and the big weekend celebration starts on 31 July. I forgot about that. It's massive. Power boat & hydroplane races on the lake. Usually the US Navy Blue Angels do air displays there plus there are other air displays. The only practical way of getting to it is public transport (which is not bad in Seattle) and they put on special services. Better check whether that's a factor for your day there. If you haven't realised one day in Seattle during summer is not enough by now, you never will!

Lived there for a year. Seattle is an absolutely wonderful place. A great city. You've got some tough decisions to make! Aviation related (in no particular order): Boeing Factory at Paine Field, Everett (north of city). Paul Allen's Flying Heritage Collection, also at Paine Field but at the other end to Boeing. Museum of Flight at Boeing Field (south of city). Not aviation related (in no particular order): Space Needle Pike Place Markets Seattle Underground tour ("Beneath the Streets") Some brief info on the above: Boeing Factory: well, it's the Boeing factory which is what makes it interesting. Don't think you're going to get up close and personal with the planes on the assembly line though. You'll see it from a distance on a viewing balcony, but it's pretty impressive. Quite fascinating. Flying Heritage Collection: Paul Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft and loves planes. He amassed an amazing collection of historic military aircraft, had them restored to literally their original condition (the lengths he went to are a whole separate story), and pretty much all of them are airworthy and actually fly. You can't touch, but you can walk around very close to them all. Incredible collection in this Museum. Museum of Flight: I was there a whole day from opening time to closing time! From the original Boeing factory with its old woodworking machinery set up, to the Concorde (you can walk through it), etc etc. Too much to list. Space Needle: tall building with impressive view. Meh. Pike Place Markets: Quite historic and people who like markets absolutely love it. Good places to eat there, but I'm not a huge market fan overall. Underground Tour: the "old city" was built at sea level and the "new city" was built above it after it burned down. Some of the old city remnants were restored and you get a tour around below ground. It's actually quite interesting (more than I've made it sound!) Suggest you get googling!

Having been to the USA a lot, that doesn't look like a highway to me. That looks like a suburban road. Their limit on suburban roads is not much different to ours, so given that 60 kts = 111 km/h, the overtake doesn't surprise me at all.

N-177MF (the one you showed photos of) #50 of 66 to fly - crashed after loss of engine power just short of destination, at the end of a 512nm flight fully loaded with 2 occupants. Max range of a Pitts Model 12 with full tanks - approx 500 statute miles. Seriously, you're going to blame this one on the engine being unreliable are you? N-488WT is also suspected to be a fuel issue but of a different nature. There is no evidence that VH-DZN (crashed 10 Jan 2011) had an engine failure, but there is evidence that it spun inverted all the way to the ground after an aerobatic manoeuvre. The pilot had never undertaken spin training. We know that for a fact, because we were still begging him to do the spin training just before he crashed FFS. Do you realise how many M14Ps were produced and are out there? You know it was in production for around 30 years and powers over 20 different aircraft types, including every single one of the 1,800 Yak 52s don't you?

And what engine powers the Model 12, acro?

Sorry guys but I can't really make any more public comments on this. I've been directly contacted by Police and the ATSB to assist in providing information related to the Model 12 (ATSB arrived on site this afternoon) so that's it from me on this one for the time being.

Second in Australia. The previous one entered an inverted spin during vertical aerobatic manoeuvre and failed to recover. Illegally carrying passenger at the time. Hadn't done spinning training to our knowledge. Both killed (no offence intended to anyone who knew the pilot - just stating the facts). Mine is the only one left (the other has not been in a flyable state for quite some time) and the only one here professionally built by the designer/kit manufacturer. There is one more under construction that I know of. Several lost in the USA: - crashed performing unauthorised low level aerobatics. Pilots killed. - one landed on top of a light aircraft lined up for takeoff. Pilots in both aircraft survived. - during low level aerobatic aerobatic display did tumbling manoeuvre, exited in an inverted spin, transitioned to upright spin, failed to recover with the height available. Pilot killed. - fuel starvation on long range flight. Pilot survived. - engine failure after takeoff (possible fuel starvation but it's still being investigated). Pilot survived. One lost in the UK: - attempted something similar to "Cobra" manoeuvre at low level (like the Russian Sukhoi jets do). Pilot seriously injured but survived. They're the ones which roll off the top of my head. The Pitts Model 12 is a high performance aerobatic biplane which does exactly what you tell it to do. The exception to this can be vertical manoeuvres at very slow speed, when the big prop and engine take control a bit. But this is fixed by pulling the throttle back to the stop. Of course it is not resistant to spinning and doesn't care whether it's right way up or upside down, but it will recover with correct control inputs and the standard disclaimers (available altitude, CoG, serviceability, etc). See my Model 12 spinning video on this forum (Student Pilots and Further Learning section). I plan to make some more when I get a chance.

2 x Fosters cans (greenish ones so yeah they'd look a bit like VB from a distance). And a Tooheys can. The guys at JKE who built it thought the Fosters cans were a nice touch, and they were the only extra-large cans of aussie beer they could find which fit over the exhaust pipes. I put the Tooheys can on the common manifold drain valve under the right side nose cowl but I plan to turf the lot of them in favour of a wheelie drip tray one day.

Yeah very sad. The kit manufacturer will be devastated, as will the former owner who spent a massive amount of time building it. Not to mention the family of course.

I was flying my Model 12 up there this afternoon and mine is the one which used to be in Dave Dent's hangar at Camden (it was re-assembled there last year after manufacture and importation from the USA). I had landed, put the plane away and was almost home when I was called by the hangar owner who sounded a little stressed (he was not at the airport). My Model 12 is orange, white and blue. The aircraft operating from Maitland was VH-JDZ, an all red Model 12 which used to be at Camden in a different hangar, and I'm somewhat familiar with its history at Camden but it was fairly recently sold to a guy I don't know who was operating it at Maitland. I really don't know much at all about what or with whom it was doing there. I was actually planning on static displaying mine right next to it at the airshow on the weekend but I couldn't get the time off my day job.

Yeah, but you're supposed to take the prevailing conditions into account, especially when doing STOL. Even harder to explain with a presumably rehearsed routine. I don't agree with dishing out punishment for these things at airshows, but stalling on an approach fits into the "fundamental screw-up" category. If there was any action taken I'd prefer it was in the form of ensuring that others learn good lessons from it.

Commentator: "Folks unfortunately something happened that we didn't expect....." Yeah.....he stalled it doing a slow speed handling display and crashed.

Hence my usual mantra when I'm flying my day VFR biplane: "There is no excuse too shallow to explain heading back to the pub for a beer."

Whether the aircraft broke up in flight or was intact until it hit a hill is a fundamental question that any competent accident investigators can answer with a very high degree of certainty, based only on the wreckage examination.

Language translation software doesn't handle German grammar very well, or the famous German compound-nouns. But I don't want to create a Leserkommentarspaltenhöllenlärm here (all hell breaking loose in the comment thread).

For me the novelty of continuously "fighting" with the behemoth software that started as the meek and mild Dos + Windows, then Windows 95 (ok but buggy), then Windows 98 (somewhat useless) then Windows Millenium Edition (so bad that if you dropped it to ISIS on the battlefield you'd have them surrendering in droves) through XP (the best version they made) then the lumbering bumbling juggernaut of Vista to get everything to work correctly was the novelty which wore off and saw me convert to Apple.

I accidentally downloaded the 8.3 upgrade thinking it was the 8.2 version which had been approved for use on our company iPads only a couple of weeks earlier. It caused the takeoff and landing performance application for Airbus to crash and an urgent message was sent to all pilots not to install 8.3. This app is kinda important, as it computes V speeds and thrust settings for every takeoff. That was embarrassing. Lesson learned - look carefully at what version you're about to get if you hit the "install" button!