red750

The FAA has announced that the company operating these tours has now ceased operation. Their safety history is still being investigated.

Jeez you know how to kill a joke.

OK, but when referring to something 8 posts back, it helps to use the "Quote" facility to create relevance. Threads have a tendency to drift.

The Vickers Type 432 was a British high-altitude fighter aircraft developed by the Vickers group during the Second World War. Intended to enable the Royal Air Force to engage the enemy's high-altitude bomber aircraft, it was to be armed with six cannon. The origins of the Type 432 lay with a requirements set out in 1939 for twin-engined fighters with 20 or possibly 40 mm cannon. Vickers had set out a proposal for a Griffon-engined aircraft, equipped with a 40 mm cannon in a flexible mounting. This was subsequently encouraged by the Air Ministry. Further development was carried out for a design that could also meet F.6/39 for a fixed gun fighter with 20mm cannon. Specification F.22/39 was drawn up to cover the 40 mm project as the Vickers 414 to meet Operational Requirement (OR) 76. This was subsequently revised with aircraft redesigns to become specifications F.16/40 and then F.7/41 for OR. 108. In appearance it resembled a larger version of the de Havilland Mosquito and was known to some as the "Tin Mosquito". The pilot had a pressurised cockpit in the nose, with a bubble dome, similar to an enlarged astrodome. The pressurised cockpit took up the nose section so the cannon would have been fitted in a fairing below the fuselage, to the rear of the aircraft. The aircraft's elliptical wing was built using a unique stressed-skin structure, designed by Barnes Wallis for lightness. The top and bottom were manufactured separately, and then clamped together at the leading and trailing edges, this being named "peapod" or "lobster-claw" structure. This allowed a large internal space unobstructed by ribs, hence capable of housing large fuel tanks (similar to Wallis's geodetic designs). The first prototype Type 432 DZ217 was flown on 24 December 1942. Initial trials revealed serious handling difficulties on the ground, the aircraft snaking while taxiing, necessitating aft movement of the mainwheels to correct the bad tracking. In flight tests, the Type 432 was unable to be landed in a standard "three-point" stance resulting in the replacement of the Irving-type ailerons with new Westland types along with an alteration of tail settings. The estimated maximum speed of 435 mph (700 km/h) at 28,000 ft (8,535 m) was never attained as the Merlin 61 engines did not run satisfactorily above 23,000 ft (7,010 m). When the competing Westland Welkin was ordered into production, the second prototype of the Vickers fighter, the Type 446, was cancelled, before completion, on 1 May 1943. The first prototype was retained by Vickers for test purposes until the end of 1944, when the aircraft was scrapped after completing only 28 flights.

And that relates to parking at Tullamarine? How?

Airport parking stations (Wilson Parking) is a licence to print money, Many floors of parking, you get giddy going around the entry/exit ramps, and run up a couple of K's looking for a parking space. All at an exorbitant rate per minute.

My son got back from his trip to Phuket this morning. I got there about the same time as his plane landed. Allowing for him to go through customs, I was in the carpark at the airport for about an hour. The parking fee - $`17.00

A gyrocopter pilot has been injured in a fiery crash-landing on the World Heritage-listed K’Gari (Fraser Island) in Queensland. Witnesses were close by and watching the low-flying aircraft moments before the crash just after midday on Friday. It happened near the Moon Point camping ground, 360km north of Brisbane, with the impact throwing the pilot from the aircraft. The pilot, a man aged in his 50s, injured his hip, head and arm. He is in a stable condition after being flown by rescue helicopter to Brisbane. “(The aircraft) hit the deck maybe 50 metres from us, bounced, and then stopped another five metres, and then flames just erupted,” witness Mark Davies, from Karma Dives, told 7NEWS. “As soon as I saw it, I knew it wasn’t going to end good so I just sprinted down to it.”

A photo off the TV of VH-KKM.

A Robinson R-44 crashed at Moorabbin with non-life threatening injuries to the pilot and passenger. The helicopter had only been in the air 5 minutes when it returned and crashed while landing. It ended up on it's side with the tail boom bent 90 deg down.

The photo I based that post on appears to have been deleted. An image search has failed to fimd it.

Something odd. The photo of the family in front of the helicopter shows a black and white aircraft. The photo of the wreckage hauled from the river shows a black aircraft. How?

Two adults, three children and the pilot were killed when a helicopter broke up and plunged into the Hudson River in New York. The Bell 206 lost its rotor blades and tail in the accident, and the rotor blades were seen fluttering down into the river. Video of the helicopter tumbling upside down can be seen here. Agustin Escobar, who has been President of tech giant Siemens in Spain since 2022, and his family were on a sight-seeing flight after arriving in New York that morning.

Another view of the solar panels, from Google Streetview.

Because it was cheap, low kms, and more comfortable than a mobility scooter. From the end of this month, I'll normally only drive 4 km each way per day, 3 days a week. Could walk it if I wasn't 80. Longer trips once in a blue moon.

Aerobatic aircraft damaged at Bathurst racetrack operated in no-fly areas | ATSB WWW.ATSB.GOV.AU

It's a Holden Astra.

It passed a roadworthy check when I bought it less than 3 months ago.

Just a slight aside to my posts on my trip to Tulla and Essendon. I couldn't believe how blatently motorists ignore the speed limits on the Tulla Freeway. Every 100 metres or so there is a large overhead gantry with illuminated speed signs for each lane of the freeway. Most were showing 80, which is the speed I was travelling. But just about every other motorist was tearing past me (and most likely cursing me) at speeds likely up to 100 kph or even more. Cameras on the gantries must have been having a ball. The red arrow indicates the next gantry.

The odd looking aircraft is a Lockheed QT-2PC. It is an aircraft designed for auditory stealth at night, with a unique design that includes engines on the back to reduce noise. It was successfully tested in combat in Vietnam, where its silent performance allowed it to go unnoticed by the enemy and collect valuable information.

The Ganzavia GAK-22 Dino was an unusual light utility aircraft built in Hungary in the early 1990s. In configuration, it was a biplane with cantilever wings and a very pronounced negative stagger, making it almost a tandem wing design. The pilot and a single passenger sat side by side under an expansive bubble canopy, and it had a fixed tricycle undercarriage. The fuselage was of welded steel tube construction, and the wings of duralumin, with the whole aircraft skinned in fabric, other than the forward fuselage which had aluminium skin. A single prototype flew in 1993, but the project was abandoned by the mid-1990s, with the aircraft itself placed in the Transport Museum of Budapest (Közlekedési Múzeum).

My wife's neice drove one of those huge mine dump trucks in Qld.