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Bruce Tuncks

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Everything posted by Bruce Tuncks

  1. Bruce Tuncks
    I often back out of a purchase when ridiculous postage costs arise. One method I once used was to put my address down as that of a mate in the USA and then ask him to repost the item. I don't like doing this because it is imposing on them and also a bit of extra work on my part. I would hope some internet person would see a business opportunity here and provide a service but alas I don't know of such a business.
  2. Bruce Tuncks
    I reckon crossed controls are a pro-spin input, together with up elevator.
  3. Bruce Tuncks
    We really need to know how much when planning... please help start a database. Small/medium fees ( ten dollars or so ) are reasonable for me, but I have heard of $500 fees!
  4. Bruce Tuncks
    Funny how we think in psi for tyre pressures.. We were supposed to go metric in 1974 but I have always thought of tyre pressures in psi.
  5. Bruce Tuncks
    As long as there was not so much water that your plane got squashed under the roof huh.
  6. Bruce Tuncks
    Here's some trivial info... A tyre pushes down on its surface with approximately the tyre pressure. ( the difference is what is carried by the tyre side-walls) So a 30 psi tyre carrying 1000 lb of aircraft weight has a contact spot of 1000/30 sq inches or about 17 sq inches. At 20 psi, this will be 20 sq inches which might be noticed on a walk-around... It is not required to check the pressures at every DI. Oil-damped shock absorbers, like on the chipmunk, are just wonderful to land with. One thing which puzzled me is that the 2 tug pilots who have landed my Jabiru both did bad landings. Yet a session of tugging gives heaps of landing practice and they filled me with awe about how good they were. One clue was how easy the chipmunk was to land compared with the SK Jabiru. I guess the other is that the Jabiru is very different to a Pawnee tug and these guys were doing their very first Jabiru landings. Personally, I have never flown a Pawnee. It does not have oleos but it does have rubber shock-cords in the landing gear.
  7. Bruce Tuncks
    Skippy, the lower air pressures help to save the mainspar from landing loads. The energy to be absorbed is the landing weight times the vertical speed. So softer tyre pressures help here.
  8. Bruce Tuncks
    I was mates with this guy who nearly died flying veggies to an oil rig in the middle east. Apparently the loaders substituted lettuce for cucumbers one day. Loaders are not renowned for their ability with c of g calcs. But in this case, the pilots forgot to check properly.
  9. Bruce Tuncks
    AND, what lesson should Australia take from all this? Apparently the Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons ( russian ones to be sure ) in return for guarantees from russia and Nato that they would guarantee that the Ukraine would be protected. I have been amazed that Australia signed the non-proliferation treaty with nothing given in return... so we feel it necessary to be the US's best friend and support every stupid war they entered in the hope that one day they will use nukes against China or Indonesia on our behalf. We should use Roxby Downs uranium and get Jabiru to make a thousand drones and have our own deterrent.
  10. Bruce Tuncks
    There was a frightening similarity between the US attacking Sadam and the Russians attacking Ukraine. My son correctly predicted that they would have to attack before the weather got too hot for the plastic germ-warfare suits that the US had. This time, the russians had the coming spring thaw which would render their army tanks immobile as far as the countryside was concerned. So Putin was under pressure to go ahead just as the US was under pressure with the suits. In both cases, we now know that they should have delayed.
  11. Bruce Tuncks
    Yep Apename, I probably did unload the elevator as you suggest. My memory of the whole thing is not good, but I still have a photo of a snow-covered mountain top, ( northern face snow in August), in Nevada as a momento. The valley floors are at 5000 ft and the ridge-tops are at 12,000 ft. I had climbed over the ridge-tops and flown out over a valley, so the 17,000 ft was on the clock but it was "only" 12,000 ft above the valley floor. You can sure get high there... another day, I saw 19,0000 ft on the clock near Hawthorne, on the way to see area 51 where certain lunatics think the govt has UFO bits in storage. There is a one-horse town which consists of a service station on a dusty gravel road. Out from the service station, there is a track leading up to a bare hilltop, from where you can apparently see some buildings in the distance where the alien artifacts are stored. There were no customers looking when I flew over.
  12. Bruce Tuncks
    Thanks Rdog, that was great. I just love real hands-on stuff like that.
  13. Bruce Tuncks
    And I have sold both my Libelle and my SK Jabiru! Thanks admin.
  14. Bruce Tuncks
    Last I heard of John Olsen, he was given lots of lucrative posts by the then Labor government. For example, he got big money for being on the board of the Adelaide Oval. He was an honoured statesman.... Personally, I would have made him pay back a lot on money to the taxpayers of SA.
  15. Bruce Tuncks
    I reckon the opposition party also has a lot to answer for... They could announce that the property will be re-nationalized at some time in the future and the buyer will only get their purchase money back, with no extra. There was a liberal premier who sold housing trust houses by the street for $3000 each. The labor party wrung their hands but didn't say that they would be bought back for $3000. The premier was John Olsen and the date was late 1970's. There was a time when government housing changed from being provided to anybody ( mainly workers ) to being reserved for "needy people " which included addicts and parolees and hard-core dole types. ( no kidding... you got extra points for all those things ) .The shortage of housing brought on by Olsen's actions made this happen faster, and there were suburbs where fear of neighbors was the rule.
  16. Bruce Tuncks
    Its getting worse... Imagine dialling 000 and being asked for your bankcard number before continuing... thats where we are headed for sure. I reckon the reason why electricity was privatised was because the government did not want the bad publicity from disconnecting people. That, and of course the easy profits.
  17. Bruce Tuncks
    It looks like there are lots of ponds around the airfield... would these make it bad country for russian tanks? I hope so.
  18. Bruce Tuncks
    I agree Danny. Altitude is too expensive to just throw it away. But stalls at altitude are quite safe.. I have never tried to spin the Jabiru though. Stalls in the Jabiru are a non-event if you sneak up on them gently. The plane just starts mushing along and I have been told that the rate of sink is about that from a ballistic chute.
  19. Bruce Tuncks
    When I saw about that big plane, I wondered if that were the same airfield as Aeropract uses.
  20. Bruce Tuncks
    Is Gympie airfield OK?
  21. Bruce Tuncks
    I worry about the aeropract factory . Are they OK? They appear to be in just the spot where the russians are. Do they use the same airfield as that enormous transport plane? If needed, I will send a donation directly there if possible..
  22. Bruce Tuncks
    I entered an accidental spin once. I was at 17,000 ft taking a photo through the clear-vision panel of a ventus glider. My eyes were at the camera and I was trying to frame the photo with the rudder pedals. So I dunno what the speeds etc were, but that ventus sure kicked into a spin. Bugger, thought I, my old mosquito would not have done this. The spin turned into a spiral dive after half a turn, so pronounced was the pitch-down. Recovery was simply a matter of pulling out smoothly. Nobody else was around and there was all the height in the world.
  23. Bruce Tuncks
    What scares me is not the spin itself but the load on the wings during recovery. Ripping your wings off sure scares me. I actually knew a guy who died when his Nimbus 4 glider broke up in a thermal in Nevada. It was thought that they had spun during thermalling, then ripped the wings off doing the recovery.
  24. Bruce Tuncks
    I nearly died when the guy said that it was more than $100 for a new Falcon battery. I asked why and he said " the global price of lead mate" so I said that my old battery had the same lead as ever. When I tried to sell the old battery at the scouts recycling place, they offered $2. Next time, we should do like RF guy thinks and take the lead out ourselves.
  25. Bruce Tuncks
    I have been nonplussed at how they lost so many planes and instructors and students in ww2 port pirie basic training in tiger moths. They lost 5% of the enrollees, and yet we here in Gawler didn't lose one in 50 years! Their instructors must have been worse than the worst any of you guys had I guess.
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