dutchroll

You will never get a VFR lane through a military area where fast jets are based. Never (in my opinion). Having come from military aviation many years ago, I can fully understand why.

Naturally there is no specific age - it's like asking "how long is a piece of string?" At 40 you have plenty of flying years left if you want to make it that way. However it depends what sort of flying you're talking about. I know a string of airline guys who have pressed on well past nominal retirement age and have been forced to stop flying after repeated licence failures, rather than some of their peers who bowed out several years earlier on a high with an impeccable record. It is sometimes emotionally devastating to them. It might seem undemanding, but the simulator checking and licence testing aspects are rigorous and unforgiving, and don't normally involve an uneventful sector from A to B on autopilot. You can't stop the ageing process of the body and the brain. When whatever type of flying you do is getting too hard and you're making more and more mistakes, or getting more and more frustrated, then that's the time to turn your attention elsewhere. I think the same principle goes for any hobby or occupation. Listen to your body, not your ego, and be critical of your own performance. Then you'll know when to stop. ;)

In all honesty, if an owner-builder gets an experienced test pilot to accompany them on Phase 1 testing, then something goes terribly wrong and the test pilot commands a bailout and jumps, but the owner-builder refuses, then: a) you're in the exact same scenario as if the owner-builder was doing his own test flying solo anyway, and b) the owner-builder has just shown himself to not be very smart, as the end result will show.

An experienced test pilot yells "hey the plane is out of control and it's not responding - bail out!" and you decide "meh, he doesn't know what he's talking about - I'll save this baby - just you watch." I mean, seriously?

I'm still puzzled why anyone would actually think this step is a bad one. The ruling from the FAA is not mandatory. If you want to test your homebuilt solo, you can still do that under the old provisions. What it does is provide a legal basis for people who are amateur-building from kits to have an experienced 2nd pilot with relevant qualifications on board for flight testing to help mitigate flight testing risks. It makes special mention of the increasing complexity of kit-built aircraft. This is not some idea that someone came up with on a whim. This is a two year old recommendation from the National Transportation Safety Board. The FAA then did a review of 10 years of historical accident data relating to Phase 1 testing in the homebuilt community before releasing this ruling. The advisory circular gives substantial guidance on the issue, including determining the PIC and so on. If the homebuilding community decides to ignore NTSB recommendations and FAA safety studies of Phase 1 flight testing, it risks shooting both its own feet clean off.

To me personally that's not a very convincing argument. There are many factors which can influence who might be the most appropriate person to test fly a plane. In the big wide aviation world outside recreational and amateur-built aviation, the reality is that the test pilot almost never built the thing. Also I would question if the plane has been built counter-intuitively such as switches or throttles working against normal aviation conventions (and in those cases the conventions have very good reasons for being the way they are), whether it should be flown at all. Perhaps it would be best for the builder to just fix it so that it makes sense, but who is going to tell him this?

I don't see a problem, provided the obvious intent (ie a relevantly qualified and experienced pilot) is adhered to. There are many people out there building their own experimental planes who have quite limited flying experience. In those cases I believe it will amount to a net reduction in the risk of the first flight, not an increase. You will find that there are highly experienced pilots who will be willing to do this and accept the risk, though the ones I've met will certainly charge you accordingly (and fair enough too). Alas some builders will also be made acutely aware if their build quality and documentation is not up to scratch, as such pilots are usually very fussy about the experimental aircraft they're about to hop into! While that might be damaging to the ego, I don't think it will be damaging to safety. Quite the opposite.

Yes that would work. The wingspan is quite short, so with the runway under the wingtip you're quite close. But that's not a normal GA circuit and fitting in with other circuit traffic often makes this impossible at the places I commonly fly. Agreed. This is why when I'm cruising from A to B in it I continually assess the immediate area for forced-landing suitability. In the RAAF we were trained to execute forced landings until our eyes bled. High key (if you have 2500'). Low key (if you have 1500'). Look for an open space in front of you with anything much less than that. Wait til the aimpoint is well until the nose before taking flap.. Etc, etc. In advanced training in the Macchi that continued on to conducting an instrument approach with a flameout. Yes, a glide instrument approach down to landing! In my Wings Test (looooong time ago) I remember on the first takeoff getting a low altitude engine failure which led to simulated ejection, followed by a circuit, touch and go, another engine failure upwind but ejection seat doesn't work, line up for forced landing somewhere, go round, join circuit, engine failure downwind, glide approach, touch and go, engine failure upwind, no ejection but can make the cross runway, quick glide approach, touch and go, another engine failure on climbout, setup for another glide approach, OK that's all good, now let's go out to the training area for some aerobatics. This goes some way to explaining the soaking wet state of my flying gear upon return (I passed too). This type of training hangs with you for a very long time. It's all well and good to "practice", but if you're not trained in proper techniques in the first place, that's a problem.

I don't personally know of too many guys who regularly practice glide approaches in a Pitts, because where you can land is generally determined by what is immediately beneath you! If you don't have a field somewhere below you, then you have problems. At 3000'/min descent rate if the prop isn't coarsened off, you have as little as 20 seconds to touchdown from circuit altitude, and that's if you don't turn! You cannot make it back to the runway from anywhere on a "normal" GA downwind spacing.

Generally a suitable field for gliding a Pitts into must be under the wingtip. Having said that, mine has a markedly different glide performance depending on the propeller blade angle. Fine pitch will result in > 3000ft/min rod. Coarse pitch about half that. With a real engine failure it'll go to coarse pitch anyway due to blade counterweights, but if you have oil pressure, it'll go to fine!

My wife doesn't fly herself. However she really enjoys going to airshows and is genuinely interested in many aviation things. She'd rather go to an airshow than go to a shopping mall! ....and you can't ask for any more than a wife who loves going to airshows!

I think sensible but respectful discussion (and yes I know that's sometimes a fine line) on accidents and incidents is what this forum was created for. I sincerely hope this forum doesn't turn into an obituary column where talking about accidents and incidents becomes too hard for fear of causing offence.

That's very interesting. As per my previous post (and not wanting to detract from the tragedy of the situation), survivability aspects struck me as very puzzling given the footage I saw. As it happens, I was actually flying over Mudgee enroute from Cessnock to Narromine when all this was unfolding and heard a lot of the relevant radio traffic on area freq. Upon my return I was pondering my own situation of being strapped in by a Hooker aerobatic harness into a carbon fibre seat to the point of barely being able to move, knowing that the chrome-moly tig welded tubular airframe of my aircraft has been shown to be quite survivable to well over 10g vertical deceleration (albeit with significant back injuries in the case of the accident I'm thinking of). The actual cause of the accident is of course the other question I'm pondering and I won't publicly speculate. There are simply too many possibilities at this stage. I'm confident they'll be able to quickly narrow them down however.

Yeah one of my questions is regarding the survivability given the pretty intact and upright state of the aircraft, and that being on approach it was presumably fairly low speed. I find that puzzling.

With the ATSB formally investigating hopefully we will get a thorough answer, whichever way it goes. A couple of questions are running through my mind based on the news footage and the eyewitness descriptions.

I have the Trig TY91 which has a built in vox intercom (and also the ability to switch to a PTT intercom). Both the intercom and the radio work great.

Yeah the problem arises when we start allowing the flight attendants to interpret the rules and do their own mental arithmetic or use their own judgement for airworthiness matters. It opens a can of worms. Trust me! What will happen is that one day, an F/A, when asked why she took the liberty of allowing 20 pax to move from B zone to E zone, will say "well I remember when we moved a baby to a row in front and it made no difference at all!" Before you ask: while not all are that stupid, some certainly are!

I don't personally recall any of my company colleagues talking in the 3rd person like that, but I've heard other airlines do it (BA is notorious) and I cringe when I hear it. I'm right with you & would fully support debriefing students on that one!

T Think yourself lucky. On an unofficial company chat forum recently we had guys copping it for incorrect use of possessive apostrophes, unnecessary past participles (well ok that criticism might've been my contribution!), starting sentences with conjunctions, and the crème de la crème: the incorrect use of the second person possessive pronoun instead of the second person present tense of the verb "to be"! That's "your" versus "you're", if you're wondering!

There is no such thing as elevator trim on these jets, so yes the horizontal stabiliser moves quite a bit in response to pitch trim inputs in various configs (esp when taking flaps etc). But the full range is much more than you need for "normal" operations, just as an elevator trim can move to much greater extremes than you normally need in a small plane.

I've always had a healthy disrespect for load sheet calcs. Sure, most of the time it's pretty right, but on some occasions on the B767, and now on the A330, I've input backstick at rotate speed only to have the plane try to leap into the air with gusto and require a quick check forward, or for little effect and requiring a significant extra effort! This is usually followed by a "well so much for the f*ing stab trim setting!" comment or similar after takeoff! Fortuitously the big jets are responsive to corrective inputs over a wide CG range. The big problem occurs if the TOW is undercalculated on a performance limited takeoff (aka Melbourne and Emirates a while back, which almost had tragic results).

Yeah Andy, my German-made Sonnenschein SLA gel batteries are good for discharge to around the 60-50% level before the life cycle is exponentially affected. Certainly less discharge is always better. My point is firstly that the technology is there already (e.g. lithium-titanate batteries), but it simply hasn't found the economies of scale and thus the cost benefits yet. Secondly we have become so used to rapid technological breakthroughs in many areas (particularly computing) that we have developed unrealistic expectations of how fast cutting edge research in other areas actually proceeds.

The argument that people only keep researching stuff because the grant money flows in is generally a fallacy (albeit a popular one). The reality is a bit different. There is no fame or money for doing dead-end research. The big $$$$ and the worldwide recognition is if the research is actually successful and therefore marketable. There's no long-term incentive to keep doing it if it becomes obvious there won't be results, even if the Government is paying for it. Heck I have a battery bank that'll run my whole household for several days, using only 50% of its charge. Yeah it's a couple of square metres in size and the batteries are 80kg each, but 20 years ago it would've occupied a large shed and the batteries probably would've been half a tonne each. I have an iPhone in my pocket which has far more computing power than the Mercury-program launch computer at Cape Canaveral which occupied almost a whole building in the 1960s. The increase in power and the reduction in weight and size will get there, and it's progressing faster than you actually think. It's just that in the modern age we've become impatient and want everything to come to fruition tomorrow, not next week.

My apologies. I meant CASA, who were assisting the police investigation. In fact ATSB reports are not admissible evidence in criminal proceedings.

To lay charges after the ATSB investigation indicates a fairly strong case probably exists. We've been over this before. Flying at very low level without really knowing what you're doing or where the obstacles are, is a recipe for tragedy. Adding passengers into the equation is just stupidity.