dutchroll

It doesn't make the engine sound "noisier". It changes the balance of which sounds can be heard, while reducing all continuous noise substantially. The ANR can obviously only cancel noise frequencies which already exist on a fairly continuous level. Good ANR headsets do this extremely well. I guess (?) what he is saying is that if a more irregular or uncommon noise occurs in your engine, this will be more distinguishable from the attenuated background noise. In any generally loud aircraft (which is almost all light aircraft) ANR is better for your hearing, and better for being able to have a comfortable radio/intercom level set, period.

Spend the money on a good quality aviation headset. Once you lose your hearing, you will never get it back. Seen more than one person have major medical and licence problems due to hearing loss caused by long term noise exposure.

First thing looked at was my ipad keyboard. "Ah....I know exactly what he's done!"

Yeah the Pitts has a 20kt crosswind limit, but as I've said previously on this forum, I fly it for fun, not for hard work. It's challenging enough on its own landing a high performance taildragger with a radial and very low prop ground clearance when you can't see anything at all out the front. I don't need to add touching down on one wheel in a sideslip to the equation!

On initial type conversion to a small plane it does. You do get used to making the adjustment eventually though. The greater risk is of flaring the small plane too high, because you're purely relying on a visual sight picture and it does take a little while to adjust to it when your "normal" flare height is 30+ ft. If only I had a dollar for every time an instructor in a small plane had told me: "No not there..........no not there either........no still not there........yeah that's it!" In a 767 or A330 you use a vastly different sight picture coupled with audio prompts from the automated radalt calls, so at "FIFTY" you start thinking about it, and at "THIRTY" you act on it. And funnily enough only last night a colleague was recounting a story of when the auto callouts failed and he did a hard landing which had to be written up in the maintenance log!

Yeah but my plane is based at YCNK - that's why I want a cross runway. Drove out the other day in the brilliant sunshine just to turn around and come home due to the crosswind!

Be nice if they could put a cross strip in, though I realise they don't have the land and it ain't ever going to happen!

Call Christine at C&H Freight in Melbourne on (03) 9330 0800. They specialise in aircraft imports. She can tell you all you need to know. You're correct about aircraft being duty-free, but they will slug you the 10% GST. Essentially it will be your responsibility to provide "acceptable" documentation to Customs which states the value of the aircraft.

I've cancelled several attempts to go flying in the past few weeks with the gusty winds. I fly a biplane in my spare time to have fun. "Fun" does not include gusty 20kt crosswind components. I leave those conditions for "work".

I sympathise, but unfortunately there are a great number of passengers who are mind-numbingly stupid - the stories I can tell! The "telling you to suck eggs" announcements are legal cover so that if they are disregarded, we can have the mind-numbingly stupid passengers arrested, banned, etc.

The sidestick was introduced by Airbus on the A320 onwards, driven by the move to a fly-by-wire design and other associated features (flight envelope protection, etc) which they didn't have on their earlier models. Airbus were a lot quicker to embrace fly-by-wire on their commercial jets than Boeing. Some of my less informed colleagues swore they'd never transfer from Boeing to Airbus because they'd never trust a fbw aircraft. But then they said they'd love to fly the B777. Go figure - the B777 was Boeing's first fly-by-wire commercial jet, except they retained the conventional yokes (and the Boeing FBW flight controls on Capt and F/O sides are mechanically linked together, whereas the Airbus ones are not). However Boeing decided to not completely let go of mechanical linkages and a solitary spoiler panel on each wing is mechanically linked to the B777 flight controls. As for the Air Crash Investigations episode? They simply got the details wrong. While the actual accident facts in ACI episodes are usually pretty right, they do sometimes screwup the film set, and occasionally there are technical mistakes in the narrative too. Quite some time back I swore I'd scream if any more ACI episodes came on with the pilots speaking to ATC through a handheld mike (and although there's a cabin interphone handset in the cockpit, even cabin PAs are usually done over headset/intercom). But eventually I lost my voice.

You and me both......and I have to communicate with them every day at work! We have iPads which contain our flight plans, briefing packages, takeoff and landing performance data calculations, enroute and approach charts, and FCOM suites. They are switched on continually from boarding the plane to after landing. We're supposed to put them in "flight" mode for takeoff and landing (though many of us forget half the time), and we have them plugged into the cockpit electrical system for charging during flight. They are stock-standard Apple iPad 3's with wifi + cellular (company plan, 12GB/month download unrestricted, so long as it's legal). So coming from an airline pilot, I fully sympathise with passenger frustrations at being told to turn their devices off. But it's currently the law and if we let people break it, we get in the sh*t. It's ridiculous but unfortunately Australia will probably, as usual, be the last country on Earth to update the regs to reflect reality.

A history of engine failures in one particular aircraft type in a commercial company would cause a massive sh*tstink. I know - I've actually observed one in my own company not long ago! Yeah I know it's "only" GA/RAAus, but sheesh......

There are a couple of different "flavours" of fear of heights. The fear of heights you get on a cherry-picker, or a balcony, or a cliff, is really more a "fear of falling from height". This is very common and pilots are no exception. However when enclosed in a cockpit, the secure surrounds negate this fear of falling and so the "fear of heights" disappears. The brain is a strange beast. Some unlucky folk have both a fear of falling from height, and a fear of heights!

This is all very easy to explain: The MTOW - Maximum Takeoff Weight - of any aircraft is the absolute no sh*t maximum weight limit inclusive of pilots, passengers, fuel, bags, bug splatters, oil, coffee thermos and every single solitary thing which is either inside or attached to that plane, at which that plane is legal to takeoff. Notwithstanding the legality, it is most unwise, bordering on insanely stupid, to deliberately exceed an aircraft's MTOW as you are in unchartered and untested flight territory. MTOW is aircraft type/model specific. When an organisation talks about a "MTOW limit" they are normally talking generically, e.g., "We won't register any aircraft which have an MTOW above XXX kg".

There's a very straightforward reason for that. The original design of the A340 - a sizeable long range airliner - required a 2 wheel centre bogie for structural reasons. As is usually the case, aircraft designs change size as airlines demand various extra levels of performance or load capability. This is why for any given airline jet you often see there is perhaps a -200 version, a -300, -400 and so on. Usually they "grow", but occasionally, such as in the case of the B747SP they can "shrink" too. In the case of the A340, it grew, and grew quite a lot. The A340-600 was a much longer and somewhat heavier version, for which the 2 wheel centre bogie did not provide enough structural support. So Airbus engineers had to change it to a 4 wheel centre bogie to cope with this increased load. This was only one of many design changes it needed (including larger engines and so on).

Lol. Apologies for thread drift, but fact: Every single flight I do out of Singapore to Australia (SIN-PER, SIN-MEL, SIN-BNE, SIN-SYD) departs within a hour or so of a Jetstar flight to the same destination. A subsidiary low-cost no frills airline competing against its own mainline carrier on identical routes. Same for Sydney-Honolulu, which I have dozens of in my logbook. Every airline executive around the world, bar one particular individual (any guesses who that might be?), says that it's madness to compete your budget low cost carrier against your premium brand on the same routes at the same times. Fact (firsthand knowledge, not hearsay): the former manager at one of these international destinations tried to send an invoice for a million dollar ground handling/maintenance service contract to Jetstar, and had it returned to him with a message that the payment would be billed to the mainline carrier (Qantas International). He responded that no way, it is for the low cost carrier so it needs to be billed to them. He then received a message from a very senior manager in Sydney that he would do as he was told and send the invoice to the mainline carrier. Fact: I have sat in the cockpit of a Boeing 767 chock-a-block full of passengers waiting 20 minutes for a Brisbane gate to become available even though there was a serviceable, unoccupied one at the terminal right next to (literally the adjacent gate) our originally planned one which was occupied by a delayed aircraft. When I called on the radio to our company ports coordinator enquire why we couldn't use it, the answer was "sorry, that one is reserved for the low cost carrier and even though we have no scheduled arrivals on it, we have to pay them a massive amount of money out of the mainline international budget if we use it for a B767 turnaround" Fact: Line rectifications and engineering costs performed by Qantas International employed engineers on Jetstar A330s were billed under the QF international cost code (relayed to me by an engineer who had just been berated because he put the Jetstar cost code on the documentation for servicing their A330). And you wonder why Qantas International is losing money? It's because in many aspects they are paying for two airlines but only receiving the revenue from one. Remember, only a few years back before Jetstar came along and the QF share price went south, Qantas International was making billion dollar profits. What happened so suddenly? I can assure you my income hasn't changed much although I have forfeited some conditions of employment along the way so it's nothing to do with me getting a payrise!

You pretty much can't get from Asia to Europe without flying over a "war zone" somewhere. The India/Pakistan border area is a permanent war zone and they both have high tech air defence weapons. As is all of Afghanistan and its various borders. As is the Gulf area including the routes over Iran and Syria. Several countries require "Air Defence" clearance to fly over. Going up through Iran you actually have to talk to Air Defence Radar before the FIR boundary (actually I was always more worried about being shot down by the US Navy on that route, as they are no strangers to shooting down an airliner full of passengers with a surface-to-air missile). It has been that way for a long, long time. It's a matter of airlines choosing the "least risky" war zone to fly over or near. Or go to Europe the long way via the USA.

Qantas stopped flying to mainland Europe quite some time ago, having pulled out of all those routes which went via Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong, and gifting them to other competitor airlines. Also we have only operated much more limited flights to LHR (Heathrow) and only via Dubai - a route which does not cross Ukraine/Russia - since gifting virtually everything else to our former arch-competitor Emirates (and people wonder why Qantas is forecast to approach a $1 billion loss this FY when most other 1st-world airlines are coming into profit). If Qantas were to imply that it has everyone's safety in mind because it doesn't fly over Ukraine, it would be highly disingenuous. And I fly for them. A change in route to avoid the airspace is not always easy. Typically an alternate over, say Iran, instead of Afghanistan, could add nearly an hour to the flight time. Also the airline has to have overflight clearances for the countries the alternate route crosses. Lufthansa and KLM were among other airlines using the same route as MAS - and these are "top tier safety" airlines! So I suspect something was seriously awry with the threat assessments given to or processed by the airlines. Although having said that, we were back flying regularly over Afghanistan not all that long after 9/11. The security advice was much the same as perhaps MAS had. The only "threat" was MANPADS like Stinger missiles & some Russian equivalents which are effective only against low level traffic, certainly not something at 35,000ft. Mind you, I would be more wary of civil war in former Soviet states because of the sheer number of fairly capable missile systems in various hands there.

No need to shout. I agree that the separatists are a bunch of uneducated thugs. Which is why I'm implying that the shooting down of the aircraft with an SA-11 did not happen unassisted by people who actually knew full well what they were doing.

Which part of the bit you quoted back at me, or any other part of what I've written so far, was a "load of bollocks", Phil? I'm curious.

I should expand on my previous, as well as the point about whether MH17 should've been there in the first place: It's an unfortunate fact that long-haul airlines fly over or near various different countries where groups of people are continually trying to kill each other with quite a variety of weapons. It wasn't really that long after 9/11 before we and many other airlines continued flying to Europe over Afghanistan (in a 747 with a white kangaroo on a red tail) and could look down from the cockpit marvelling at what a hellhole was passing beneath us (looked so peaceful from cruise altitude!). One of the main alternate routes is over Iran, where failure to call air defence radar before you get to the FIR boundary can get you into a lot of trouble. We used to fly over the former soviet bloc country borders all the time before pulling out of most european destinations in recent years, even though some of them have a tenuous relationship with the old mother Russia. These routes and similar ones are par for the course in many longhaul airlines particularly when travelling from Asia to Europe. Airlines have risk management and planning teams who look at the various dangers and decide whether a particular route should be avoided for a while. I don't know whether MAS had all the information they needed to make a proper decision or how they viewed it, but I guess in hindsight at the very least, it has turned out to not be a good idea to fly on that route at the moment. The other point is that insurgents, part time combatants, separatists, etc generally don't have easy access to the types of weapons needed to shoot an airliner down from 35,000ft. It's been quite a while since I needed to know the various envelopes of Russian anti-aircraft systems, but certainly the average MANPADS (man portable air defence system) which is the Rolls Royce of weapons to most rebel forces cannot hit an aircraft at typical airline cruise altitudes - nowhere near it. This requires heavy equipment. An SA-11 for example (one of the possible suspects), requires specialist training to operate. You don't just hop in and flick a red switch. This is a large tracked vehicle with crew, computer, fire control radar, etc. Whoever targeted and fired that missile was trained, and was operating some serious vehicle-mounted equipment. While it's totally predictable that they'd deny everything in the first instance, how the Russians react in the coming days will be very interesting to say the least.

I suspect IFF technology would not have made a lot of difference. They would have known it was at a cruising altitude typical for airlines and they would've know that it was on a common civil air route. Although it's not yet 100% proven which side it was, it certainly has a strong whiff of "Russian-backed separatist forces" about it at the moment. And by all reports so far they seem to be rather unapologetic too.

Ah yes OK. I get the point. "What our certified and trained pilots do is nothing to do with us". Very good. Carry on. This is not going to end well for you if that same attitude is persisted with over time.

It was an RAAus licensed pilot. This implies that he was RAAus trained. That an RAAus licensed and trained pilot was flying a type for which he was not qualified, and for the icing on the cake was doing something really stupid, makes it become an RAAus issue to consider whether RAAus likes it or not. This is not the same thing as directly "blaming" the RAAus. This is saying "hey, one of your boys killed himself doing something both illegal and dumb". I would think that the safety people within the organisation would take a look at this and say "well even if we don't mention it directly, it would be nice if our people learn some lessons from this". At least that's what any other aircraft safety organisation would do. You can't just wash away the issues of pilots trained in your own organisation by saying "oh yeah well the aircraft wasn't registered to us so none of that matters". The SAAA doesn't do it. The EAA doesn't do it. The big boys don't do it. A CASA problem? The cause of the accident had nothing to do with the aircraft type and had everything to do with the "pilot in command". That it was VH registered was incidental! And CASA may well make it your problem if that type of thing continues to happen!