Bruce Tuncks

It would be insane to change a 12 year-old engine which has done only a few hundred hours for a new one. It would also  be counter-productive reliability-wise, as anybody who has read Mike Busch knows. He shows graphs which demonstrate that teething troubles make the most problems.

I read that those drones were powered by a volkswagen derivative made in China and listed at a surprisingly low 50 hp.  I would have expected 80 hp.

Israel has so far refused to sell any air-defence stuff but I did see a report that the Israelis had bombed a "warehouse " in Iran that was in the supply chain for these drones.

Why cannot those in power see that this type of warfare only makes people angry? The terror attacks on Ukraine are counter-productive for russia. People ( rightfully to me ) see what awaits them if they don't fight harder. And maybe send something similar back to Iran, except sent to military targets.

Are there any real examples where terror has worked? I can cite several examples where it had the opposite effect.

Spacy, I hereby declare you to be much smarter than some might think.  But I must relate how this guy at work pulled over a young woman who was driving on bare rims, only to be threatened with a charge of molestation if he didn't go away. He went away and she continued on with the bare rims.

Good point Geoff, I have assumed the friction is sufficient to cause overturning and not sliding. Sliding ( by intuition ) would occur with a gravel surface and overturning on bitumen... The rav 4 I know well was on bitumen, turning right onto a road where the camber and the slope was already in the overturning direction, and the occupants were mightily surprised when it rolled. I reckon they shouldn't have been so surprised.  But as you suggest, this is a weakness in the question.

I would like friction to be used for other questions too, like stopping distances with locked brakes on different surfaces. These would be simply weight times coefficient of friction times distance equalled the initial kinetic energy. Highly simplified I know, but still amazing results to some.

Wow, I was just thinking of the problem in high school terms.

How much sideways force does a tilted ( wheelbase and weight and height of c of g ) car need to move the resultant ( gravity plus inertia) force beyond the wheelbase? ( eg if the c of g height was 1m and the wheelbase 2m ,  then the car would overturn when the resultant ( weight plus centrifugal force ) reached 45 degrees. 

I don't think that's too hard, not after being taught how to do it.  The point is, you will be safer if you understand the forces acting... 

Here's another...  suppose some joker put a hidden ski-jump on the road and the car suddenly found itself going vertical. How high would it go for ( a) 40 kph and (b) 120 kph? ( answers are 6.3m and 57m ) This is simply  converting kinetic to potential energy. I reckon anybody who could not understand this, when taught properly, could never  understand the effect of excessive speed. Sure, it is simplified in that air resistance, for example, is ignored.

( There was a ford falcon in Darwin which was wrapped around a pole at about 7m height, and the suburb was flat... the driver was a 20 year-old soldier who died. How did he manage this?  No prize for the answer.)

Don't agree about co2 turbs. Many thousands of tonnes of the stuff sitting over this farm. I wish that the govt would pay to have some of it removed by charcoalization and burying. This would be the exact opposite of subsidizing coal.

No brendan, I only want to exclude the lowest ten percent of IQ from driving. I have read and believe to be true, that 90 percent of the accidents are caused by this lowest ten percent.

Anyway. most people think like you and there is no way that I am going to get to find out for sure... But most people who I reckon are safe on the road could learn to pass my exams.

On re-reading OME's post, I think he is trying to say that everybody should be allowed to drive. Even if you are " non-mathematically inclined"...  I don't  agree.

Yep, I was stuck behind a silly old bugger and after i overtook him I was told off by a cop!

Anyway, for OME's info, I would make sure that kids could calculate, for example, how centrifugal force combined with road camber could make your rav4 "unexpectedly"  roll. This actually happened to a couple of youngsters we know well. ( They are both high-school teachers now, but I personally regard them as uneducated ).

I would actually ( and semi-secretly )  be using the stuff to keep morons off the road... for every old fart who presses the wrong pedal, there is a silly youngster who crashes at 200kph. I reckon they could both be kept off the road ( actually, be kept from having a license which is not quite  the same thing, but it is the best we can hope for ).  The morons would start to show an amazing interest in physics. I don't object to you adding stuff like biology but that is secondary to me.

If you are using per capita figures though, I reckon that the air force would be by far the worst.

My Jabiru returns about the same  fuel used per trip figures as my car. The jabiru can go direct, a big saving, but it has to hold itself up ( induced drag ), which is a big cost. They balance out pretty well. But an air-force jet uses way more fuel than my Jabiru, and it has the same number of people (2) usually.

Hey Ian, please tell us more about your defiant plane....   I assume it's the Rutan one?

I would like to see simulators used in driving tests. There are retarded young people on the roads who constitute as big if not more of a risk than the silly old buggers.

If you cared about safety, you would want these removed as well if not first.

There is truth in thinking that people are different when they rock up for a test, which is why I want to have high-school physics questions in the road license tests too.

Sort of Ken. That was sharp of you to see the tail of the old sk. The hangar has the old sk, the newer 230 and the son's lancair in it and is the only hangar on the field so far. The Jabiru has been sold to a guy in Qld who is having trouble finding instruction where he lives. I reckon there is so much bureaucratic nonsense around instructing that it is not an attractive occupation at present... maybe others could enlighten me here

Hi robben, what and where do you operate?   And welcome. Of course, you do not need a plane of any sort to come to this site.

Gosh spacy, I'm sorry. There are similar things around Adelaide but they are far enough apart to not stop a normal mobility scooter. BUT there is a nasty old woman who shops in Elizabeth who has a GIANT of a scooter and you can't get past her in a supermarket aisle. I wish they would put up some posts to keep her out.

When I looked into it, there is no legal width limit on a mobility scooter, but the ones my mates use are all ( even the fast ones ) narrow enough to get through a normal door etc.

Yep Ian, the easiest way to get to be a doctor is to get your degree in India and then go to England and then come here.

I was once on a ( no account ) committee which had something to do with recruiting students for the University. The medical school could have been filled several times over with straight A students, but the feds ( who owned everything ) said no. Actually it was worse than no....  you needed 99 points to get into medicine, but you got 3 points added  if english was not  your mother tongue.

The resulting class all looked asian to me.

Things have improved a lot since then. I think the feds thought they would be up for millions in medibank costs and limiting the number of doctors was the best way to keep costs down. I dunno who realized that you only need to limit medibank provider numbers.

It still has not occurred to the government that you could solve the rural doctor shortage by making provider numbers geographically based, or is this yet another example of corruption?

AND just who paid for those guys to have the ticket to enable them to demand money with menaces?

Why is getting something you HAVE  to get to satisfy regulations considered as getting " something for free?"

Surely if you are in a position to demand monies then you are also in a position to say just how much?

Well said FV. But I reckon extracting this sort of money from old folk amounts to " demanding money with menaces" which SHOULD be illegal.

Alas, we are quite a corrupt country.

Here's the big new Jab in the big new hangar. I like the engine, but it sure is an orphan these days. If anything, it runs too cool and I can't figure out why.

I never thought about embedded thunderstorms... thanks for the information. You are right about the instrument being useful there.

And I like the foxbat, I always called them Russian, wow that was wrong huh.

I have a Jabiru 230-d which has replaced the SK jabiru I built from a kit about 20 years ago. I really recommend the 230, there is a good write-up in the latest magazine, where it is called the flying ute. It can carry as payload and fuel, more than it's empty weight of 370 kg.

I have never had any problems at all with any Jabiru stuff, although the builder of the J230 did.

He lost a case about the 3300 engine, and now there is a Camit engine on the plane. I am happy with the engine, as the changes ( eg running a belt-driven alternator ) all make good sense to me.

And, I am a believer in electronic gadgets....  right now, I am trying to install a landing-system setup in my plane. Look up the video of Enginebridge lidar landing system.

My hope is that it will make landing easier and better.

In more than 40 years of summer glider flying, and being attracted to towering cu's, I have never felt a need for such a device. Thunderstorms which produce lightning can easily be seen for 50 to 100 km away.

Just once, north of Gawler, a guy was flying in the club's new open-class glider which had carbon spars. The pilot asked what would happen if it got struck, and we told him the spar would explode. Not only that, it would attract the lightning to begin with.

I still wonder about this....  there was a Ventus in the US where the lightning went through the fuse and exploded the canopy and welded the controls up.

The pilot  survived to tell the story.

For many years, the metal glider, based in Alice Springs, which held the altitude record of 50,000 ft, sported discharge burns on the trailing edges. The pilot, who officially climbed up the outside of the cu-nim, said that in Sweden all was legal, and anyway the zone of risk in the cloud was smaller that we thought.

They took his record away in later years. I thought that this showed a lack of sense of humour.

There is no Taxi as far as i know.