dutchroll

I was at Sun N Fun a couple of months back looking at the Avmap unit as a drop-in replacement for my old Trutrak ADI. Yes, they have fixed the hole size issue and it now slots in a standard 3 1/8 hole. Their AHRS is pretty good too - phenomenal roll rate (quite relevant to my plane) and hard to topple. The only issue I had was that the GPS input must be from their own unit (provided with the kit) so you can't tie in your existing GPS to it. They have done a number of software improvements to the interface and display since it was originally released. If its features are what you need, I think it's a pretty good unit.

Aaah.....that probably makes more sense!

Needing a lot of rudder doesn't concern me. Aircraft need varying amounts of rudder on takeoff and even more to keep them tracking down the runway in a crosswind. The comment was that he had "absolutely no rudder authority" after rotate. None. Nada. Zilch. I'm still not quite sure how that's even possible to have it on the ground, but not when you rotate, unless a different meaning was intended, but yes you're correct in saying I have very little experience in anything smaller than a Tiger Moth.

No rudder authority after takeoff? I mean, I can understand that if you don't have a rudder, but you have to ask why bother with one if it doesn't give you directional control on or very close to the runway. In any case, one wonders why you would takeoff in any sort of crosswind if that was a characteristic of your plane.

If that's correct, that aircraft design should be thrown in the bin.

Dammit.......out of popcorn! Need to grab another large bag.

Racing modified P-51s.........such a waste of a beautiful warbird.

When I was in the RAAF we had an incident on a C130 where a miscommunication resulted in a crew member mistakenly thinking he was authorised to disconnect a malfunctioning aileron trim tab to get the aircraft home on a ferry flight (thus allowing the aileron tab to "drift" in the airflow). Severe vibration started throughout the whole airframe as the aircraft accelerated after takeoff. They slowed down, reducing the vibration enough for them to return to the departure field. Could easily have resulted in the loss of the aircraft. The engineering staff had thought he was going to simply disconnect the electrical side, leaving it locked inoperative in the neutral position. He thought they meant disconnect the tab physically from its trim motor. Safety briefings on flutter, as well as clear communication between crews and engineering, were the order of the day for a while after that!

Ok now you're giving me ATPL theory flashback nightmares and I will probably wake suddenly tonight randomly screaming "RHUMB LINE!"............."LAMBERT'S CONFORMAL!".......

I didn't realise you played for the NRL!

Very well said Jaba. The point being that there are actually many people in the medical world trying to make sure that "best practice" is standard practice and unfortunately this is not readily apparent to a lot of the public. You are totally right of course about "unairworthy patients" too! Not detracting from those who are genuinely unfortunate or whose bodies have genuinely "let them down", but half the hospital patients these days are there for surgery because they've spent a lifetime trashing their own bodies without even a whiff of care. All this stuff happens in aviation too. We got rid of a couple of (major airline) pilots a while back who got away with repeated very bad violations of various types. The company tried to sack them several times and was thwarted legally on each occasion until they finally ran out of lives. I'm not even going to relay some of the stories of how they behaved in the cockpit, otherwise you'll never catch a plane anywhere again. However we do have a lot of systems in place to try to catch these types and weed them out, which GA and RA does not have the resources for.

Bullsh*t.

Interesting reading your thoughts on surgeons at various times. My wife is a surgeon. It's not so simple as it seems, though your points on "CRM" are valid and there is a concerted effort in parts of the medical world to play catchup on that. There are actually checklists for things like equipment, but surgery cases can be so dramatically different from each other (e.g., a knee replacement in a fit 60 year old versus a knee replacement in a morbidly obese 60 year old ain't the same thing!) that one-size-fits-all checklists would not work like they do for aircraft types.

I'm not sure that's a very good argument. I've never seen a truck fatality and I drive on the road all the time. Is the alleged rate of truck fatalities suspect?

I wouldn't ban it on the grounds of being dangerous, but I'd love to see it banned on the grounds that we've trashed the joint and comprehensively proven we can't be trusted to leave a place as we found it. Bottles, tins, food scraps, toilet paper, human excrement (yes, human sh*t which has been contaminating the water supplies and does not decompose in the extreme cold). I mean, "we" (collectively the human race) really are such a pack of idiots who actually do need to be banned from doing many things.

Yeah I thought invoking the Magna Carta was a bit of a stretch. We're not 13th century Barons fighting King John 1. Having said that, it has been used as a loose basis for enshrining basic liberties in national laws and Constitutions over the centuries, but you still can't argue "I have a right......because......Magna Carta".

It's ironic. Quite a number of us heavy RPT pilots get worked up about flying in uncontrolled airspace! For us the workload is far greater in uncontrolled airspace. We have traffic to look out for and separate ourselves from, we have tracking and vertical profile decisions to be made, circuit joining and spacing to think about, radio broadcasts to be made, etc. In controlled airspace we do as we're told........period. We readback instructions just as they're given. We make an approach as directed. We stop descent when told to. We start it again when told to. We track exactly where we're told to. It's just so easy! Of course in my leisure flying time it's slightly different. Even I do some preparation before going into CTA like knowing who I'm supposed to be talking to (check the chart), how I'm supposed to introduce myself to them (check the AIP), for transit lanes knowing what clearance I might expect to hear (check the ERSA), and being very careful of where the CTA boundary is (check the chart again)! But this is all stuff which gets done on the ground before I leave.

Lol. No they don't, when the death is what they view as a consequence of freedom. A 5 year old accidentally shot and killed his 2 year old sister with the gun he got for his birthday a couple of years ago. No charges were laid. The grandmother said "it was god's will. It was time for her to go I guess." An American I spoke to said "yeah it's tragic, but it's the price of our freedom." This is pure idealistic libertarian BS. It doesn't work in a civilised society, and never has. There is a lot of the same style of mentality in the aviation scene, and if that mentality ever gets ingrained in Australia, it'll be sad day indeed. You do not cause other people's deaths or injury, or create unnecessary risk to their life, and simply fob it off as the price of freedom. What, like the 5 year old girl critically injured in the ultralight crash in Victoria last year? Stupid irresponsible 5 year olds. What shall we do with them? Seriously? He had one time interval to give, his track was already known, his altitude was already known, and I gather it took him all of 20 seconds to get the radio call out. Yes it's a stupid rigmarole because if you're VFR you are not entitled to traffic information and can be refused such at the whim of the controller. How does that work? You're doing the right thing airmanship wise to increase your SA as far as potential traffic conflicts go, but you're not entitled to the information? Is that nuts, or is that nuts? Yet this is the system Dick always seemed to want, and that's what we got. I am all for progress, such as electronic flight planning, ADSB rollout, etc, etc. However I do not believe that there is convincing evidence that during his tenure he saw the money spent "where it does the most good". I and numerous others.

In the USA the regulatory regime is dominated by what they consider their "Constitutional rights", which in many cases amounts to a right to be a complete moron resulting in the death of yourself and others. Not many other countries, including Australia, see it that way. You can still go through military areas in Australia. You just have to ask. I fly VFR through Richmond CTR (which is much larger than a Class D tower would have) every time I fly to maintenance and frequently when it is active. Not once have I ever been refused a clearance, but I would expect that if there was a formation of 6 C130s airdropping 200 parachutists over Londonderry DZ right near the VFR route, I would probably be refused a clearance. In the USA however, it's your divine right to fly straight through the middle of it. I have no issues with not allowing such personal piloting decisions to be made. The difference is that in Australia they won't let you be a dangerous fool, but in the USA they will. Even so, if you have a genuine gripe about something ATC is not letting you do, there is a very simple and 100% guaranteed way of getting your way. It is called an "operational requirement" (but you better be prepared to justify it). Onto our current day system: a colleague of mine was flying VFR to a large country airstrip. He called up before his descent and asked for traffic. In the USA this would never be an issue and they'd give you radar observed traffic. Here in Australia you've got buckley's because you're VFR and frequently outside radar coverage. The controller refused to give him traffic - he's VFR and not entitled to it anyway. He responded "Roger, flight plan details when ready to copy". The controller was a bit shocked and asked him to go ahead, and he promptly changed to IFR status, gave tracking and level details, an ETA, then requested traffic! Lo and behold there was conflicting outbound traffic with whom he had to coordinate separation from, and the other pilot complimented him on his tactic. From the airmanship side he now had separation coordinated many miles before the conflict would have occurred as well as a very good indication of where to look out for it, rather than just hoping for the best that he would catch the other aircraft visually (which had already given its departure call before he was on frequency) before anything became an issue. I am not saying we should return to everything we did back in the old days. However there are a lot of things which were taken away under the misleading catchphrase of "affordable safety" which I think were nonsense decisions.

I was the one who wrote that and if you look at a map of radar coverage in the United States you will see that the vast majority of the entire continental USA is covered by radar above 4000' (even more so if you look at it above 10,000') and it has been that way for as long as I can remember, which is back to 1989 when I first participated in exercise Red Flag at Nellis AFB, Las Vegas Nevada. It was still that way for all the trips I did to Travis AFB, for the 3 months I spent flying around Atlanta out of the Lockheed-Martin factory at Marietta Georgia, and on numerous other occasions. The exceptions are some of the very remote areas of Nevada, Utah, and smaller portions of Oregon and a couple of other States. It makes a fundamental difference to ATC being able to "see" what aircraft are doing as opposed to the situation in Australia. Yes Travis AFB is depicted as an "alert" area but it has a Class D tower from which you most certainly do need a clearance to transit through. While there is no "technical" requirement to talk on the radio or carry a transponder outside that in the Class E surrounding airspace you would be an absolute nut to try this on (regrettably there are plenty of those about). Try operating through A-682 (the Travis alert area) as if you were just crossing a danger area and let me know how you go! Travis Approach and Travis Tower operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you don't believe any of this, or want their opinion of VFR bugsmashers charging through A-682 without talking or squawking, contact the 60th Air Mobility Wing Flight Safety Office. I know exactly how that conversation will end..... Might? You "might" decide not to fly through an MOA? I know quite a number of pilots in the USA who fly VFR and not one of them will fly through an active MOA if they can possibly avoid it.

Hopefully neither, as both are quite avoidable!

Dick is a polarising figure in some ways. I applaud him for his philanthropy as a businessman. He gives a lot of money away to various good causes, unlike the majority of other rich Australian business personalities, the majority of whom will die still holding the first 100 million pennies they ever earned. I wish more business people were like him but in Australia it'll never happen. On aviation though, I'm a harsh critic of Dick Smith. I think a lot of his decisions when in charge of the CAA were misguided and arguably selfish. The USA is not Australia, and Australia is not the USA. The USA has radar almost everywhere, and more airfields than you can poke a stick at. They have TIS and we don't. Etc, etc. It has a fundamentally different air traffic situation. I believe he ignored most of these factors in his pursuit of changing (ie reducing) the way services are provided here. What is good for them may not be (and I believe has not been) good for us but he seems to insist on believing that it must be so.

I shot this video only yesterday taking the plane for a fly out of YCNK. Cloud base was starting to come in so I didn't get the inverted spins done (hopefully in a couple of weeks time). The Go Pro mounts were just done a couple of months ago at the first Annual. Haven't hooked up intercom audio yet but I plan to. Interesting listening to the stresses on the airframe though! Standard recovery always works for the latter Pitts variants, and the experimental Model 12. I think Beggs-Mueller will work here too but I haven't tried it yet. I just do it like I was taught in the military (and it's been in my muscle-memory for quite a long time now!): - Throttle idle - Identify direction of turn (if no turn needle, look straight ahead over the nose) - Apply full opposite rudder - With neutral ailerons, move stick forward enough to unstall the wings (if inverted move stick back) - When rotation stops, immediately centralise controls (avoid the crossover) - Recover from the dive Landing makes up for the two before that!

Minor correction: I don't like being thrown into the deep end! I was sort of "asked" - in a traditional military kind of way - to do a quick and dirty conversion onto the Winjeel because they temporarily needed another pilot. Actually there had just been two fatal accidents involving stalling in a turn at low level, so most of the instruction concentrated on the Winjeel's major vice of occasionally flipping itself upside down in a stall. The circuit work actually wasn't too hard, believe it or not.

A wheeler in my plane could easily cost you a prop overhaul and an engine strip. Somewhere in the vicinity of $40k!