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PA.

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Everything posted by PA.

  1. Whilst flying Google I found this work site and unless I am very much mistaken it's a new airfield.
  2. Dick Smith Foods Pty Ltd is a taxable entity. If all the profits are given to The Trustee for Dick Smith Foods Foundation which is a registered charity then no tax from profits would be paid. This is no different than any company making a donation to a charity. While Dick Smith could write a cheque for a couple of million that does not help the farmers, packers, truckies and all the other people who earn an income from the products sold by Dick Smith Foods. The real value is not $4 million but likely $40 plus million worth of activity in communities that need and want to work. Don't give them charity, give them a job. Dick Smith Foods gives people work and then any profits are given to charity via the The Dick Smith Foods Foundation. I feel like some Ozemite about now.
  3. Woolworths sold Dick Smith Electronics for $90,000,000 who then did creative, but legalish book revaluations then listed the company and sold it for $520,000,000 At the time Dick said WTF it's not worth that. http://www.smh.com.au/business/retail/dick-smith-not-surprised-dick-smith-shares-have-bombed-20151207-glhgdm.html
  4. PA.

    F-16 Drone

    And then blow them up.
  5. Several mothers sitting in a cafe in Damascus having a morning coffee and chatting about their kids when one says, "The problem with the children these days is they blow up so young."
  6. After the divorce Paul McCartney was asked if he would ever go down on one leg again. He said no and please call her Linda.
  7. When I was in Bali I saw a sign on the side of a Taxi, it read "English speaking driver." I thought that's a fantastic idea, we should do that in Australia.
  8. A great loss to the aviation community, a greater loss to his family. I never met him but had great respect for the man.
  9. Don't drop the passengers out the back like a pigeon at take off, use the cesarean method. This is the go. Notice how similar to a modern F1 car Thunderbird 2 looks?
  10. Found it, here you go.. Parachutes capable of carrying entire aircraft exist, so why aren’t they installed on more planes? Wouldn’t they save lives in emergencies, wonders Katia Moskvitch. By Katia Moskvitch 23 December 2013 John Farese’s plane engine quit without a sputter, and he began to plummet. Farese, a US lawyer with 42 years experience flying his 1978 Cessna 182 plane, had failed to register that there was a problem with the fuel tanks. He was too slow in a banked turn, so the plane rolled left in a spiral stall. At 400ft above the ground, he was going down – fast. Fortunately, his Cessna was equipped with a simple but clever technology. As the ground loomed, he pulled a handle just above his head. There was a huge impact, and everything went white. “I thought I was dead. Then a second, more violent, impact, as the plane fell out of the top of the trees,” Farese recalls. He survived with a sprained back. What saved Farese’s life was a parachute capable of carrying the whole plane – it slowed his descent just enough. This type of parachute is found on many light aircraft. Some manufacturers and engineers argue that if they were installed on commercial airliners, the lives of hundreds of people could be saved in mid-air emergencies. So why haven’t aircraft companies embraced the idea for all planes? Before addressing this question, it is worth considering what may seem a more obvious solution: parachutes for individual passengers. Given that there is a life-jacket under every seat on a commercial airliner, it might not seem like a bad idea to stuff a chute under there too. In reality, individual parachutes would be impossible to use in an emergency involving hundreds of people, says Guy Gratton, an aviation research fellow at Brunel University in the UK. After all, what are the chances that some 300 people on a plummeting plane have time to don their chute and leap from the plane in an orderly manner? “Frankly, I think not a chance,” says Gratton. Whole-plane parachutes are arguably more suitable in a crisis because they can be deployed quickly. That’s why about 10% of all small general aviation planes are equipped with a single chute that carries the plane, with its passengers, cargo and all. On small planes like those manufactured by Cessna or Cirrus, the parachute is stored in the fuselage, either behind the back seat or in the centre section of the wing, above the cockpit. In an emergency the pilot has to pull a handle in the ceiling of the plane. Once the large chute deploys, the descent rate is about 1,700ft per minute (518m) – so the impact you'd expect on the ground is equivalent to “jumping from a 4m tall ledge,” says Travis Klumb, Cessna’s director of flight operations. Planes are also equipped with other features that help cushion the drop, such as crushable aluminium inside the seats and landing gear designed for a controlled collapse during a crash-landing. Making the plunge One of the main manufacturers of whole-plane chutes is Ballistic Recovery Systems (BRS), based in Miami, Florida. Founder Boris Popov started his company after a glider he was flying as a young man spun out of control. He plunged into a lake from about 500 feet (150m). His survival inspired him to seek ways to make aviation safer. The biggest planes equipped with the BRS parachutes are for five people, but Popov is planning to install parachutes on planes of up to 20 passengers within the next five years. He believes that, in principle, you could install them on much bigger aircraft, perhaps even large passenger planes. “There is no doubt that big commercial airliners of the future will be equipped with some kind of a parachute recovery system,” he says. Yet is this a realistic prospect? There is no doubt that many are sceptical, citing reasons ranging from the potential bulkiness of the technology to lack of demand. Gratton says that technologically it’s possible to equip an airliner with a parachute, “but you’d have to ask whether there’s any real value in doing it. Certainly you would lose a very large amount of the airliner’s payload, so you’d have to reduce the number of passengers you can carry very significantly.” All the safety features available on an aircraft have been selected on the basis of “what is most likely to save lives for a given amount of money and a given amount of weight,” he adds. The spokesman for the UK Civil Aviation Authority is not convinced that a parachute would always help either. “It is rare that all the engines stop, and if only one stops, the pilot can still, in the majority of cases, land the plane.” When a plane does stall, there might not be enough time to deploy a parachute anyway, he adds. Finally, it would be difficult to design a parachute system big enough to carry the weight of a commercial airliner. The largest, the Airbus A380, can carry up to 853 people, and weighs nearly 400 times as much as a small personal aircraft. And that doesn’t include passengers and luggage. “Any parachute system [on an Airbus] would have to be very large indeed and comprise multiple canopies,” says Alizee Genilloud, a media relations manager at Airbus. “The system would be complex, bulky and heavy and require multiple safety devices to make unintentional deployment impossible.” Still, if you were to build a parachute system that could carry a larger plane, what would it take? To safely bring down a big commercial airliner such as a Boeing 747 with about 500 people on board, there would have to be 21 parachutes each the size of a football field, says Popov. “It takes about a square foot (0.1sq m) of material to bring down one pound (0.5kg) of aircraft.” This would likely be unfeasible. So to decrease the number of canopies, one solution could be to ditch all the heavy parts of the plane in an emergency, such as the wings and the engines, says Popov. The parachutes would rescue the passenger cabin only. Gratton agrees that shedding weight would be the best method, albeit an extreme one. “If you had to do it, then getting rid of the wings and the engines is the right thing to do – I just hope you don't do it over a city,” he says. The idea has been considered before though: a detachable cabin was first proposed by a Russian inventor, Gleb Kotelnikov, in the 1920s. He is credited with inventing the first knapsack parachute, which was later used by the Soviet military in World War II. Kotelnikov’s design never went beyond paper calculations, but the main Russian parachute-manufacturing institute, the Scientific Research Institute of Parachute Design and Production (NII Parachutostroeniya), is busy developing an aeroplane parachute recovery system that is partly based on Kotelnikov’s nine-decades-old idea. One design consists of cutting the wings off with special blades, and then separating the passenger cabin into several modules, with a parachute attached to each. These parachute systems can also be used to “drastically reduce speed and avoid human casualties during take-off and landing accidents,” says the institute’s chief designer Viktor Lyalin. The downside is that they won’t be available any time soon because they require extensive redesign of the aircraft. So while parachutes appear to be unlikely to arrive on large planes any time soon, it may at least be possible. Popov is adamant that within this century, all planes of all sizes will have parachute recovery systems – all it would take is public will. “A lot of people keep asking: ‘Why can’t I have a parachute system on a Boeing 737 when I fly to see grandma?’ Well, if enough people ask for that, it’ll force the aircraft manufacturers and the governments to make these revolutionary changes.”
  11. Have to wonder why he didn't just land the plane on the road. Oh the engine has stopped, time to pull the insurance company just bought my plane lever.
  12. Sarah the chicken farmer has about 500 hens, but no rooster and she wants chicks badly. So, she goes down the road to the next farm and asks if they have a rooster that they would sell. The other farmer says, 'Yes, I've got this great rooster, named Old Butch. He'll service every chicken you've got, no problem.' Trouble is, Old Butch the rooster costs $3,000, a lot of money, but Sarah decides he'd be worth it. So, she buys Old Butch. Sarah takes Old Butch home and sets him down in the barnyard, but first she gave the rooster a pep talk. 'I want you to pace yourself now. You've got a lot of chickens to service here, and you cost me a lot of money. Consequently, I'll need you to do a good job. So, take your time and have some fun,' Sarah said, with a chuckle. Old Butch seems to understand, so she points toward the hen house and Old Butch takes off like a shot. WHAM! Old Butch nails every hen in the hen house - three or four times, and Sarah is really shocked. After that, Sarah hears a commotion in the duck pen and, sure enough, Old Butch is in there. Later, she sees Old Butch after a flock of geese down by the lake. Once again - WHAM! - All the geese get it. By sunset he sees Old Butch out in the fields chasing quail and pheasants. Sarah is distraught and worried that her expensive rooster won't even last the night. Sure enough, Sarah goes to bed and wakes up the next morning to find Old Butch on his back out in the middle of the yard, mouth open, tongue hanging out and both feet sticking straight up in the air with Buzzards circling overhead. Sarah, saddened by the loss of such a colourful and expensive animal, shakes her head and says, 'Oh, Old Butch, I told you to pace yourself. I tried to get you to slow down, now look what you've done to yourself.' Old Butch slowly opens one eye, nods toward the buzzards circling in the sky above and says, 'Shut it, you're scarin the fanny away.
  13. Not big into the Bible and other fairy tales.
  14. We were so poor our chauffeur slept over the garage and the house staff slept in the basement below the east wing.
  15. Fishing ... If you don't have 900 horse power you are doing it wrong!
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