Head in the clouds

Ah, I got you now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Not sure quite what 'more' you want johnm - are you not aware that not all aircraft are required to carry radio? Or are you not aware that seeing an aircraft on a conflicting flightpath is the most effective way to avoid allowing it to hit you? As far as many peoples' ability to correctly interpret what comes over the radio - if you've ever done any student instructing or carried out BFRs, you'd be aware that many people under pressure just don't hear the radio at all, however clear the broadcast may be. Then there's the fact that some radio transmissions are so poor you can't make out what's being said, and there's no point getting them to say again, the repeat is just as bad ... Or there's the perfectly clear transmitter but the pilot broadcasting is 'radio-shy' so they either mumble half of what they're wanting to say, or gabble away a pre-prepared script so fast that it's unintelligible. Other radio-shy people either don't broadcast at all or leave their calls so late that they're sometimes of little value. Every now and then you get a nice clear well-timed call that the student or pilot hears but then they have to work out what it actually means. Sometimes it can bring tears to your eyes watching them trying to work out where the other plane actually is relative to them, and where they're going - establishing their relative spatial awareness, in other words - and all this time they've been concentrating so hard on the radio calls they haven't had a glance around for traffic for several minutes at a time. Many times I've thought we'd all be safer if everyone spent their time looking for other traffic rather than fiddling with the radio, stressing over their next broadcast, or mentally juggling the positions of other traffic. Like I said, you can't beat a good and regular visual scan for traffic separation, and if you develop the discipline properly your traffic scan should be immediately followed by your panel scan which keeps you properly aware of the flight and engine condition, further enhancing your operational safety, and the changes in focal distance provide beneficial exercise for your eyes.

Not all aircraft are required to be radio equipped. The rule of 'see and avoid' still prevails, and in VFR flight looking out the window with a proper scan is far more effective at maintaining separation than trying to interpret the often confused, inaudible and/or garbled transmissions that many people make.

I havent weighed it yet but think it's going as well as it can, given that airframe strength is the first priority. Two reasons for that, crash survivability and general ruggedness for off-airfield operations - it's a bush plane first and foremost. There's 60kg of chromoly tube in it so far, 2kg of welding filler rod, 1kg of paint, about 2kg of aly sheet, about 2kg of ss sheet, 2kg of ply for the floors, the tank will be about 5kg and about 3kg of mass balance weights - so there's not much to be saved given that all of that is essential. The wheels and brakes are really light, about 3kg in total, but the big tyres are 6ply and pretty heavy, about 7kg each IIRC. There are lighter bush tyres but the advantage of these - very generously donated by SDQDI (thanks again mate!) - is that they have enough tread rubber thickness to not be punctured by goathead thorns. Hundreds of them have tried already in the tyres' earlier life ... I've lost 11kg since I started the build (and feel much better for it too) so that helps I guess.

"In addition, helicopters are no longer allowed hover in the area." I wonder which genius thought that one up ...

29th July 2017. As I mentioned last time, I have to make and install the forward tank and the forward outer metal skins before I can install the floors. Once all that's done I can get on with assembly of the controls and interior. I templated the skins using some light card from the local stationery shop and then transferred the pattern onto the 0.016" 6061T6 sheetmetal, cut them out, drilled, bent etc and that's another tedious job out of the way. While I was messing with sheetmetal I also made up the firewall. It's 301 stainless, half hard, also 0.016" thick. Stainless is depressingly heavy after all the effort one puts into keeping everything as light as practicable, then having to install heavy material for safety. Such is life. Having made the firewall at least I'll be able to go on and make up the engine mount when I next have some time on my hands. A heap of time in doing this, much of it was spent getting the protective plastic film and adhesive off because the sheet has been sitting around for years. I did find a good way to achieve it in the end, scrape the plastic film off with a razor scraper - surprisingly it didn't scratch the metal but it did leave the adhesive behind, I guess that's what protected the surface of the metal. Then spray the adhesive with mineral turps which turned it into a non-sticky gel which was easily removed with a plastic 'credit-card' scraper. A few pics - 27 hours for the log, 1603 so far.

The thing is that everyone's considering flying being a level playing field with other pastimes. However the vast majority of people these days (and 'these days' are the relevant words) don't consider that recreational flying is one of the more popular or desirable pastimes. Once it was considered romantic, adventurous or even pioneering, but now there are so many things that are thought to be just as exciting and much safer. Not only that but most people fly, as a matter of course, to holidays and even to work. So flying for fun has changed and is now so costly to meet the required safety requirements that only the wealthy can afford it. And there's the irony - people, particularly retirees, are wealthier than ever and can easily afford the horrible (in my mind) planes and costs on offer now but the new retirees aren't seeking them out for their retirement hobby. It's purely a lack of suitable engagement with and promotion to the best market in my mind. Flying school business owners have never really understood their marketing, in my experience.

Before we all imagine the parapilot being wound down into the prop of the plane we should keep in mind that all tow cables have a weak link close to the towed aircraft - just a piece of thin thread of known breaking strain, probably about 150kg for a paraglider - that breaks in just such an event as this might have been. The real, and very terrible danger was to the plane which could have sliced a wing off or wound the cable around the prop hub all the way to the ground! Even worse than Waterworld for anyone that might have seen that hilarious moment.

I could be very interested - would love to know the price ...

C'mon folks ... now you're making it up as YOU go along. Yes, we do have different rules for helicopters and you ought to be embarrassed that you don't know this. We ALL fly according to the same rulebook - please know your Regs folks or you weaken our amateur flyers' position. Hint - rotary straight in approach 'can be' 700agl, or below, whereas fixed wing circuit is 1000agl and rotary visual minima - speed reduced - is also way less than fixed wing - just 20% ... because in event of whiteout a helo can hover and land, a plane cannot. These different rules are due to the relative mission capabilities of the two very different aircraft types, as you might expect. Generally rotary doesn't have to conform to any circuit pattern, and yes, can approach directly below other aircraft direct to their hangar, the bowers, etc. And can depart in manners that may confuse fixed wing flyers who haven't availed themselves of all the air navigation rules that perhaps they ought to have ... The main thing that might appease the now offended - is that when rotary flyers take benefit of their 'special rules' is that, generally, they should only do so when they don't cause conflict to other traffic. Unfortunately for some fixed wing flyers' sensibilities is that helos are so manoeuvrable that those flyers regularly think that conflict might exist when in fact it's far from being so.

Yup, my good friend howe doesn't mention how he intends to use this 'extruded' tube. I tried to find a source of 47.8x1.7 and couldn't ... it's close to a 6061T6 size but not quite ... In pure tension or compression an extruded tube exhibits reasonably close values to its supposed tensile strengths but if it's to be used in a cantilever/bend/flex situation, for a spar perhaps, then extruded is not predictable so only DoM (drawn over mandrel) product should be used. In this case, IIRC, DoM is about 2.5x stronger.

M Most GA pilots wouldn't understand what they're seeing, if they saw it at all. And if they saw it they'd likely be discussing how that parachute must be caught up in one helluva updraft ...

Yes - and also fast military jets, drones, police helicopters ... Not that long ago I was flying, fully aware and perfectly legally, through a popular paragliding area, maintaining good vertical and horizontal separation from several paragliders, when one of them seemed to panic thinking I might not have seen him. He decided to manoeuver violently, to be more visible presumably, then he caused his chute to collapse which dumped him right in my path ... busy area, all turned out fine but could have been nasty. Vigilance is paramount ...

Hi Mark, yes, I think you're probably referring to a dye penetrant which is excellent for finding a leak if there is one. Good for showing up microscopic cracking too. When making tanks I prefer to pressure test first because that will show up leaks that even dye penetrant won't, because the size of gaseous air molecules is a lot smaller than the liquid dye penetrant molecules. All that said, I've made a few tanks for boats and only once had a small leak, that was a tank that I welded with MIG rather than TIG. The pressure test showed that there was a leak and it was quite easy to find it with bubbles from soapy water. I hope I'm not proven wrong but I'm fairly confident there won't be any problems with this one ...

24th July 2017 I was keen to get on with the 'final assembly' of all the parts I'd made and painted, and quickly discovered that I need to make, paint internally and install the metal skins to the forward part of the fuselage before I can fit the floors, and I can't fit the rest of the internals - controls etc - before the floors are fitted, and I can't fit any of that until the forward fuel tank is installed. So - a little change of the order of things and I've been working on the tank and forward skins. The tank is just a metal box of 5005 alloy which is not quite as corrosion resistant as 5025 but is a lot less prone to stress cracking and since the installed tank is well protected from environmental issues, the 5005 is the better option. Both of those alloys have good welding qualities. The tank is made from 1.6mm thick material and I don't have a bender or brake press so I cut out the panels with a 'meat-axe' (multicutter - the best and most effortless way to cut aly in my mind, but potentially the most dangerous hand-tool known to man, hence its nick-name), beat the flanges over the rounded edge of the bench and used the fluting pliers to shrink away the curvature caused by the stretching of the flange during beating it, much like making a wing rib. The tank won't be subject to any significant flexing or vibration because it will be mounted using tensioned straps with rubber between it and the straps or any part of the fuselage frame, so I made the tank 'rigid' with internal lap-welded, rather than external edge-welded flanges. It all went together fine. Though I've not done a lot of aly welding so my technique didn't make the welds as pretty as I'd have liked but I'm quite confident it's structurally sound and fully sealed. It will be pressure tested before installation so that will tell the tale. There's a temporary tab tacked to the side of the tank, that's to attach the welder's 'earth' lead while fabricating it, and since the installed tank will be electrically insulated by the rubber mounting I'll need something similar to attach an earth bonding strap in due course. There will also be an 'appendage' added to the bottom of the tank which will form the sump, pick-up point and also add another 9lts to the total volume of 61lts. Additionally there will be two other smaller tanks behind the seats and under the baggage container, each about 25lts, which can transfer fuel to the main tank and which will be easily removable, so that they can be used as jerrycans to collect fuel from a servo or whatever. A few pics of the early stages of the main tank - 22hrs for the log, 1576 so far

I think there must be something wrong with the information on the site you're quoting. 80US gals of spraying material is 320lt which would weigh something like 350kg - consider that it's one and a half 200lt drums of paint - you could almost paint a small battleship with that amount of paint. Also - last time I looked the price of the recommended Ceconite and Polyfiber coatings systems was about US$90/gal, so 80gal would cost about US$7200 plus freight! For my project I'm expecting to use about 6lt of paint weighing about 6kg. Admittedly I won't be giving it 12 coats, just one coat of 2pak hi-build epoxy in fact, and the gloss and chalking prevention will be provided by a wax polish like car polish. Alternatively it could be given a thin coat of clear polyurethane over the epoxy. I'm using epoxy because, as rotax618 said, many paints don't adhere well to the aluminium dust in silver dope, but epoxy does, and a single coat of epoxy is all that's required because epoxy is self priming, impervious, has a tough surface and the pigments cover well especially in the darker colours.

Yes, I couldn't agree more. I've really been enjoying watching this all come together. When I saw the first pics of the crashed airframe, to be honest I don't think I would have given thought to trying to repair it but it's looking pretty good already and I expect it won't be all that long before it's back in the air, probably better than it was originally. Even so, I can see there's an awful lot of work, money and effort gone into the rebuild already, nothing to do with aircraft is easy or cheap. It has to be the best thought-out and executed repair job I've seen, and so well documented as well. I imagine it will encourage a few more folks to have a go at a repair or restoration. Nice work KC!

1st July 2017. To get me out of the workshop for a while my wife suggested we might have a change and do some messing about in boats. We rented a bareboat Cat in the Whitsundays and took the family for a much needed change of scenery. That got the sailing bug back in our blood so I finished a refit of a small yacht I had bought back in January and we spent the rest of the summer weekends sailing with friends around the local islands, bays and broadwater. The cool seabreezes were certainly a very pleasant change from the constant heatwaves we experienced this season. Fully refreshed I pulled the covers off DooMaw again a fortnight ago and added the aileron control horns to the control torque tube and set to work prepping all the remaining parts and the fuselage frame to get it ready for painting. I recalled that I'd bought the epoxy paint last March (15 months ago!) because I wanted to get it painted before that winter set in, partly because I was concerned that the winter might be too cool for the epoxy to cure before nightfall, and partly because the damp winter nights would encourage corrosion, for which I'd have to remain on constant alert. In the end that's what happened and I've spent the last year regularly checking the top surfaces of the frame and parts for any signs of rust on the surface. Even though everything is covered with two layers of tarpaulins, every now and then a hint of brown will show on the etch primer and it's out with the scouring pads, polish back to bright metal and then etch prime again. The data sheet for the etch primer says to top coat it within three months and that's proven to be just about how long it provides corrosion protection even when covered with tarps. I pulled all the control system and tailwheel components off the fuselage frame, used thinned paint to slosh paint the inside of any open tubes, prepped and painted all the parts with epoxy, and set to work on the fuselage prep, then painted the frame in four daily sessions rotating it each day. It was a lot more work than I'd ever expected, six very long and strenuous days in all, there are a lot of metres of tubing in all that. I was pleased that I'd started with painting the tailfeathers some months ago because as I've progressed I've got to know the paint and spraygun requirements better each time, so by the time I got to the fuselage frame it was all going quite well. At first, when I was doing the tailfeathers I followed the paint manufacturer's recommendations (Jotun) and the spraygun manufacturer's settings guide but by the end I had ventured a long way from both. The recommendation for the epoxy was strongly against thinning more than 10% but at that it just came out of the gun in large droplets so had to be applied quite heavily to get a good coating. I was concerned that if I thinned it more then it might not cure properly, or not adhere as well, or the coating might not be tough once cured, so I made some experiments with from 5% up to 50% thinning and those samples don't show any difference between them for any of those areas of my concern. Except, of course, that I can get a good even coating much thinner with the more thinned paint. In the end I settled for thinning at 25-30%. As far as the spraygun was concerned I just set it a slightly higher pressure than recommended and adjusted the paint flow rate according to the size of spray pattern I required at the time. Those little gravity feed HVLP guns are a real pleasure to use once you get all the variables working in your favour. I've often read peoples' comments about how much weight paint adds, so that is one of the reasons I wanted an even coat without having to pile highly viscous paint on. To that end I also weighed and kept a total of all the paint I mixed and it came to just 1.5kg plus the thinner. I'm assuming the thinner evaporates off so there's no need to count its weight. I also had about 150g in total left over after the various sessions. And, at a guess, I'd say that at least 30% would be accounted for as overspray i.e. did not land on the airframe. So, on that basis I'd say the total weight of paint added at this stage would be about 1kg. That's fairly well borne out by the remaining epoxy in the cans, I started out with 2x 2lt cans and now there's about half left, and I also painted another project with about 400g of it. So - for now the painting is over and I can get on with a whole gammut of new bits and pieces to make and as they get made they can go straight into final assembly, I finally feel like the fuselage is on the home straight. My brother commented that "it's very white ...", some may recall that I chose that for the steelwork because it would quickly show up any corrosion if that were to happen (CRMO is terrible for rusting if any of the coating gets damaged). The rest of the paint will not be white, so the bright glare should tone down soon. A couple of pics - That's another 58hrs for the log, making a total of 1554hrs so far.

Really? Since when? I first joined in about 1984 so I don't recall the month. Then I went commercial and had a long break and re-joined. It certainly wasn't on 1st July but my membership runs 01/07 to 30/06 year by year. Which month is your renewal due? And what year did you join?

From the RAA news Issue 34 email that I received late yesterday I saw that RAA is offering a discounted one year Sport Pilot magazine subscription - for today only. It's a one day offer - today only. I wonder who thought that up. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the retail industry would know that if you want to create an urgency sale by limiting the period of the sale, then you need to advertise it well in advance, weeks in advance normally - not make first mention of it late the previous day. Unless they really don't have a clue about marketing and sales I'd have to assume the board and management don't really want people to actually take this offer up, perhaps they just want to be able to say they made a special offer and no-one showed any interest. If they really wanted people to subscribe why would they limit the offer to one day? Why not make the offer available during the months of June and July while people are renewing their membership fees?

You can see it's a timber prop, weight would be about 2kg. At that approx 2m distance from the CG, the aft movement of the CG would be about 1-2%, I don't think he'd have noticed it, certainly in the event it wasn't enough to slow his glide down anyway ... Years ago, flying a very minimum aircraft a bit like a lightweight version of a Jackeroo, I lost most of a timber prop and then the engine shook itself off its mounts and the only thing that kept it onboard was the throttle cable and a swaged cable I'd put around the mounts in case of just such an event - it was the fashion back then, learnt from drag and sprint cars that chained their engines to the chassis in case the mounts let go, so the engine couldn't separate and go into the crowd. And - having learnt from a friend who had a similar occurrence a couple of days earlier - he had grabbed the engine which was hanging by only the throttle cable and pulled it onto his lap and the exhaust pipe burnt the hell out of his legs, he pulled the throttle cable out of it's quadrant in the process - I already have enough previous burns so I didn't do that - instead I braced the engine forward with one foot to get it out of my face. That made rudder use difficult but I got down OK onto the massive airfield directly below. Fun days! The point is - my friend had the option of throwing the engine away but didn't want to lose control through CG change and neither did I but neither of us noticed any major change in controllability even with the entire engine moved back about a metre. Any problem would have come if we'd actually allowed a stall to develop, then the recovery would have been more exciting than usual, I would think :-) At Vne our LSA type elevators can/will produce a down or up force of approximately the MTOW of the aircraft, so a 600kg force way down the back will easily overcome a 2kg mass change a couple of metres forward of CG.

I think he probably did make calls on the radio, from about 0:40 you can see him pressing the large red button on the control stick. I'd say this was probably a a first 'glide' for him, lots of stress evident and considering that, he did quite well. Something worth noting for others that might find themselves in a similar predicament - in any engine failure there's always a strong urge to get on the ground as quickly as possible and get the whole nightmare over and done with. However that's not the best way to go about it. OK, he had an airstrip right there but trying to get down quickly will usually reduce your options for places to make an outlanding, and very much reduce your thinking time. Establishing yourself on best L/D glide speed with appropriate adjustments of that, a little faster for penetration into wind or a little slower to benefit from being carried further if gliding downwind, provides you with a much larger area, and much more time to think out the landing, than simply pointing the nose groundwards. Also - you don't want to break the airframe - have a look at this fella's airspeed when he selects flap for landing, he's about 20kts over the white band, in some aircraft that's enough to tear a flap off. He really didn't believe the prop was gone did he? Giving it several bursts of power on the way down as if it might miraculously have fixed itself - and I love the last bit of the video where he walks around the front and stares incredulously at the blank space where the airscrew used to be ... Overall though, great to see the situation managed successfully. As Kaz said, everyone deserves a big tick for that.

Hi Don, I don't wish to be argumentative but I worked on and off with Sander while he was building the SV6, 7, 8, Bandit, Farmate, Thermite etc and the two seaters ... Tardis etc and he did experiment with 'Liquid Nails' in the early times, which is essentially a contact adhesive. However he found it to be disastrous because it's not intended to be used as a mastic, consequently I'm confident that he never used it on any aircraft. If you were to use it that way (as a mastic) it suffers from entrapment of the solvent and forms large voids when it does eventually dry out and becomes extremely brittle. That is why contact adhesives need to be coated on both surfaces and allowed to 'dry' before closing the joint. Most of the SV wing-rib to spar, and spar to wing-skin attachments were performed using Sikaflex marine adhesive which is a polyurethane product and which IS designed to be used as a mastic, and should not be allowed to skin prior to closing the joint. Some of the later bonded joints on SV machines were done with Plexus methacrylate structural adhesives, and not long before his demise I introduced him to the Permabond 'T' range of 2 part acrylic structural adhesives which were developed for, among other things, Boeing's bonded aluminium wing spars ...

Am I seeing things or did the main spar carry-through break as it flopped inverted? The rear view of it inverted in the first video appears to show way more dihedral than normal, and as the helpers release the wing it appears to be loose. If that's right, is it a real Spit or a replica? I can't imagine a real Spit breaking the wing in such a minor event.

Even older than that - I flew an Ugly Stick in UK Nationals in 1974 ... ugly as, but had nice neutral handling, had to have contrasting colour top and bottom to have any idea which way was 'up'