youngster

I'm not too far into this whole flying thing, but I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be more like notevenclosetotheclouds!

In car terms, it was more or less a fender-bender. But if you are not an aviation type, anytime a plane "falls" out of the sky and the occupants survive, they must be magic.

If you get too close to Canberra today, you will inhale toxic smoke! Welcome Ross!

It's on Tuesday, as for who can attend, I dont know. I have no involvement with the organising of the event, I just saw the invitation that was sent to our office.

RAAus was not listed on the invitation my boss (an MP) received.

There is a presentation entitled the "2011 Aviation Outlook" at Parliament House next week, put on by the Australian Aviation Associations' Forum. A lot of politicians and big wigs will be there. From what I can see, most of the major aviation organisations in Australia are involved, except for RAAus. Is there some background to why RAAus is not involved? It seems a pity that we wont be able to use this opportunity to spruik rec aviation. I want to be careful not to criticise anyone, because there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why RAAus is not involved in this particular forum. Any thoughts?

I called the State Transport Minister's office a few months back to enquire as to whether the NSW Government has a strategy of some sort in relation to maintaining and retaining airfields around the state. The advisor I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about and kept telling me aviation was a federal responsibility. Maybe I should have been talking to the Minister for Lands, but surely there should be some long-term and co-operative strategy to retain, maintain, improve, and better utilise the airfields around the State.

I've only done the radio course so far, so I'm just at the stage where the co-pilot gets food poisoning and someone needs to run the radio for the captain

I gather problems with jump planes are not rare? The CFI of the flight centre I'm training at said a local bloke ran out of fuel and had emergency landings (one was really a crash) twice in less than a year.

A politician who say "Honestly..."

Not being particularly well-versed in the ways of CASA, perhaps someone with a little more experience in these things could suggest an answer to the following: With all other things being equal, would CASA act the same way toward an Australian-owned carrier? It seems most people (with the exception of those with Tiger tickets!) dont really care what happens to Tiger, but if it was Virgin or Qantas, there would be much more public interest in the situation and potentially a different approach by CASA?

In all my Sesame Street watching experience (c'mon guys, gimme a break - I have a two year old), I've never seen Big Bird actually fly. Not a good omen!

It could be worse, you could be living in the US, where a set of nail clippers is considered a threat to national security!

A forum member giving Aussie rec aviation a plug at Oshkosh: http://www.airventure.org/news/2011/110728_atf.html

There can be political interference as well, ie, a local council lobbying to keep a tower to boost the "prestige" of their airport, etc, or a strong lobby group in a particular area playing the "safety" card. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of consistency.

There is a way to get some sort of exemption to do solo training in CTA, although the school needs to jump through a whole bunch of hoops and pay a substantial fee for the privilege.

There's a couple of very hairy moments in amongst those vids! Was particularly impressed by the calmness of the Thompson pilots managing a bird strike on take off and putting it down without a problem. Never heard a hint of stress or concern in their radio calls either!

Part of the problem may be slightly unique to Coffs Harbour, in that we have a shortage of flat, vacant land for private or alternate strips, so you either fly out of the airport, or have to travel at least an hour to find another strip. That turns an early morning joy flight into a half day excursion. It just seems silly to have a great facility not able to be used, even by people who trained there. Perhaps the proposed CASA sport pilot type licence will be the answer.

I figured it's probably been discussed at some stage, but it's such a broad topic, I wouldn't even know what I was searching for in the earlier threads!

Thanks Pylon, I still dont really have a decent understanding of how all the different controlled areas work, but I can see your point about making something that is supposed to about fun a whole lot more complicated and expensive.

Jake, I'm about to start with the Aviation Centre as well. I really enjoyed the TIF in the Foxbat. Coffs has a maximum of about 7-8 RPT flights each day, and even with the training activities going on, it's not really that busy. I assume the same goes for Port, Tamworth, Ballina-Byron, etc.

I'm only new to this whole flying thing (in fact, so new I'm taking my first theory class tonight), but it seems to me that we are underutilising a whole lot of good airports because RAA flyers cannot access controlled airspace. Airports like Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Tamworth, etc, are ideally situated to take advantage of the trend toward Rec flying, but once you do your training under a CFI with a CASA exemption to train RAA at these airports, you cannot fly from the airport where you trained. Is there any logic to introducing an endorsement to allow RAA pilots to fly into some of these smaller regional airports without getting a PPL? Or some other system to make these airports accessible? As I said, I'm only new to this, so I may be missing some very good reasons to keep RAA pilots out of these airports, and I'm happy to be corrected.

That's sad, if only because it's so close to the truth!

http://airpigz.com/blog/2011/7/11/amazing-video-of-the-skyraider-and-p-51-collision-at-duxford.html

Airport security exists to make us feel safer, not to actually make travel safer. If you look at most airports, it wouldn't take much more than a determined fourteen year old to cause all sorts of problems. There are kilometers of simple chain link fence that are unguarded and flimsy, charter operations where you can just walk straight on to a plane with no security checks, etc etc. As history has shown, every time the authorities crack down on one security issue, some terrorist boof head invents a new way to be a nuisance. It has always perplexed me why we feel apprehensive about safety at the airport, but are quite happy to attend a football game with 80,000 people where anyone of them could have a bomb under their seat, and we are quite comfortable on a train even though one well placed wedge could derail the whole thing at high speed. Us humans can be odd.