Mike Borgelt

So we watch what could have easily been a snuff movie and you find humour in it? There are some lessons in the movie: 1.When test flying, wait for good weather. In this case there was a strong crosswind which presumably sprung up quickly, which can happen at Mojave. Have an alternate. 2. The aircraft had two engines but the single engine performance was marginal in which case it might be better to figure it as having one engine and fly appropriately. It should have been possible to find this out in the performance estimates during the design process. The pilot was pretty badly banged up in fact. Aviation can be a lot of fun but it is unforgiving. Opportunities for humour are there, but this wasn't one of them.

It is Mojave airport. The airliners are stored there. No passengers. Look at Google Earth

So go look at the Lilium story on the home page. It does fly.

I use Port Pirie instead of Port Augusta. Cheap fuel, friendly locals and a nice pilot lounge maintained by the locals. You can make tea, coffee, relax for a while and even buy a sandwich. Did the trip from Toowoomba to Serpentine in late 2014 and 2015 in the BD-4 which easily does Ceduna - Esperance in 5 hours or so, no stops with 2.5 to 3 hours gas left.

You are being ripped off on your glasses cost. Nothing wrong with bifocals, just get what are called the "executive lenses" which are close vision half way up, all the way across the lense. Optimise the close distance for arm's length which is where most instrument panels are. Get another set of glasses for reading. If your distance vision is Ok just get half glasses for close up instead of bifocals. You'll find you don't spend any time re-focussing when looking out and back in and vice versa. Another tip - if you fly your own aircraft, paint the instrument panel a light colour so the light contrast between in and out is not so great. The Russians do this in their military cockpits. They use a light blue/turquoise but light grey works well too. I use Sunwraps for sun protection. Cheap, simple, easy to put on an off when wearing headset. Thin tinted polycarbonate that goes over the top of glasses on the INSIDE and has bits that curve around to protect from glare from the sides. No frame. Eay to replace when scratched.

"All electric" aircraft are a complete crock. Hybrid maybe, but that involves some kind of hydrocarbon fuelled engine and an alternator plus at least one electric motor. Hybrid as VTOL makes more sense. Electric for vertical flight, less than one minute for takeoff and transition to wing borne flight, maybe two for landing and IC motor for cruise. Much less battery required. Airports can then be much smaller. The aircraft too as the wings are sized for cruise not for low stall speed and takeoff and landing. The landing gear is lighter too as it touches down vertically, gently, under automatic control. The guidance system for vertical mode (and cruise) would fit in a two inch cube for a quad redundant system. Batteries, motors and controllers to do this already exist. One electric motor/prop out case can be handled. As the electric motors are used only in vertical flight they are optimised for essentially static thrust only, hence fixed pitch. This thing wouldn't even be all that expensive. To avoid certification issues build as homebuilt kit. I cannot even think why anyone would build a certified aircraft of any kind unless they have the resources of Boeing or Airbus.

I don't see anything wrong with the Skycar concept. The problem is 8 x IC engines and associated systems. Electric is much easier. The Skycar concept was born before lithium batteries and brushless DC motors.

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The Sky Car concept was fine but with IC engines it got complicated in order to deal with the engine out case in vertical mode. Same as a V22 Osprey. Electric vertical mode makes these problems manageable as eVTOL news shows. A gazillion quadcopter drones can't be wrong. It would be interesting to know the one engine out failure rate of the small quadcopters.

Keith Page "Safety, is not a big issue just go back get rid of the fear factor teach people how to think with procedures there it is in a nut shell. Do not get me wrong -- I am all for not hurting people and not damaging planes BUT teach "Safe Procedures" .."Safe Cultures". Not the never ending diet of "Safety" "Safety" "Safety" "Safety" and no member input only the egos out of the office. Safety is the end product not the beginning." How sensible. I'm cheering. CASA, GFA and RAAus don't have safety cultures. They have rules cultures. All sorts of rules, many of which are counter productive to safety*, others make no difference and the really important ones are hidden in the noise. The organisations are operating under the misapprehension that more rules = more safety, with a notable lack of real world success. Earlier this year someone (I suspect from O/S, put in a confidential safety report to ATSB about the GFA run World Gliding contest at Benalla, saying that the GFA had a negative safety culture. GFA and CASA both responded. GFA with much verbiage claiming thy had a "risk mitigation process" (amounts to: we have rules). CASA went along with this farce. Anyone who launches 116 sailplanes from one site in an hour or so is accepting a much larger than usual risk of a mid air. There were two, one with minor damage, one where two gliders destroyed, two bailouts, two pilots injured, airlifted to hospital by helicopter, all at vast expense. The farce is that each participating country was allowed to have two pilots in each of 3 contest classes. One pilot per country and hold the 3 contests at different times and places and you have truly got a risk mitigation process. There are other ways too. Unfortunately egos of the organisers and the blue blazer brigade who sanction these contests, like to have LARGE numbers attending as it makes them feel more important. * Consider the rule about touching the controls. Your passenger, who you may fly with nearly all the time, is not allowed to be taught to fly straight and level by you and is not allowed to "touch the controls". What absurdity, what block headed stupidity. If you lapse into unconciousness what is your passenger going to do? The "how to fly and land" course is going to be very short. CASA would rather have the passenger (and you) die, it seems.

Because it was before your time in EAA. The big LSA push was early 2000's IIRC. EAA had put medical reform in the "too hard" basket and went around it by pushing LSA with its reduced medical requirements. I didn't think much of the LSA push and still don't. I'm President of Australian EAA Chapter 1308. Currently the only EAA Chapter in Australia. We've been going since about 1996 when it was EAA Chapter 1308 Toowoomba. We're happy to get members from elsewhere in Australia and have a few from other staes. I'm on the CASA Standards Consultation Committee for Sport Aviation.

Back on track. The only doubt about the Delorean design is roll control and stability. I'd think two fans at the back would be better. Battery tech is such that for just takeoff and landing, a small two seat VTOL aircraft is possible. Cruise power should be an IC engine though to get range and speed. VTOL means much smaller wings can be used with lower drag and lower structure weight. Landing gear can be much lighter also. I'm looking forward to the first homebuilt VTOL kit. Take a look at this website: The Electric VTOL News

Canada has had owner maintenance of old C172 etc types for the last 15 years or so with few problems. The FAA looked at this about 3 or 4 years ago and concluded that the owner maintenance fleet didn't have a higher incidence of maintenance related failures and in general the state of the fleet was as good if not better than the traditionally maintained aircraft. The experiment has been run and the outcome is clear. Stop muddying the waters and sowing FUD. OF COURSE RAAus has sold out to CASA. GFA has done the same (in many cases GFA requirements exceed CASA's. Annual checks instead of every two years when in a club environment every takeoff and landing is observed anyway and any problems can be nipped in the bud and no matter whether you are an "independent operator" or not if an instructor is present you are under his or her authority. You also cannot fly unless your club has a CFI, the State has a RTO/ops and the GFA has a CTO/ops. Everyone is a student pilot and nobody is treated as an individual, only as a member of a collective. The people running GFA can't figure out why gliding isn't more popular. Strange isn't it?) . It is part of CASA's plan to divide the low end of aviation in Australia so that it doesn't present a united political voice. Instead of complaining about RAAus costs rising to those of GA, push for regulatory change so that there is a fall in GA costs. There's no need to have private people doing CASA's administrative tasks. CASA is chock full of lazy, overpaid and under worked public servants whose job it is to do those tasks. They were given it by Parliament. It doesn't matter so much who does the administration - it only matters what the rules are. Increasing RAAus gross weight while simultaneously increasing costs by going the current GA path would seem pointless.

Part 149 is just a way for CASA to complete their takeover of what used to be member organisations. Already when CASA says jump these organsations simply ask "how high?" Part 149 will formalise this. Then it will be necessary to form separate organisations to act as political lobbies to safeguard the pilots' interests as the original organisations simply will not. CASA needs to write regulations so that any ordinary private citizen can obey them and not special rules for the "members" of private bodies. You don't need to be a member of an automobile club to have a licence and drive a car. Nor do you have to join an aeroclub/Federation of Aero Clubs to have a GA private licence. RAAus could simply get out of doing administration by a regulation that states: For flying aircraft under 600 Kg the medical standard is a private motor vehicle driver's licence standard and another that says that these aircraft may be maintained by their owners if so desired for private operations. All other operational rules and regulations apply.

I hope so. Arbitrary weight limits on aircraft designs are counter productive to safety, utility and general robustness of airframes. I always thought the big EAA push some years ago for LSA was a mistake and the effort should have been put into medical reform. There is absolutely no shortage of airframes nowadays.

Oh, and SpaceX is private, not a public company.

What a garbage thread. I checked some spaceflight blogs and websites and there is no mention of this.

Well, that was a spectacular example of thread drift. Pick on one small point mentioned by a poster and go completely off the rails. We should be asking what has happened to the CASA discussion paper on aviation medical reform. Comments closed at the end of March, there were 160 submissions (how many of you bothered?), overwhelmingly in favour of reform and now we've heard no more.

Using GPS speed in two directions will give you True Air Speed (TAS) . ASIs give Indicated Air Speed (IAS) . Simple web search will give RAAus the differences and then they can amend the tech manual.

Some years ago I wrote an article on GPS vs Pressure altitude mainly aimed at gliding. If RAAus is trying to get you to calibrate pressure altimeters against GPS altitude they are technically clueless. Here it is: GPS Altitude vs Pressure Altitude There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in the soaring community about the difference between GPS Altitude and Pressure Altitude so I've written this article to make it clear what both are and what differences you can expect to see. It is by no means a complete discussion, just a simple explanation of the difference. Let's begin with GPS. For a 3D fix (latitude, longitude, altitude) at least 4 working satellites need to be in view of the GPS receiver antenna. For any reasonable accuracy to be achieved at least one satellite should be somewhere near the vertical, overhead. Fortunately 30 or so GPS satellites make up the constellation and this condition is usually easily fulfilled, especially in a glider cockpit where the view of the sky is essentially unobstructed. Modern GPS receivers use all the satellites in view and compute the best solution from this. Since SA (Selective Availability) was abandoned in the year 2000 horizontal position accuracy is usually well under 10 meters and vertical accuracy of the order of 10 to 20 meters is achievable. Any discrepancies here are due mainly to the passage of the GPS signals through the Ionosphere because the speed that radio waves travel through the Ionosphere can vary with Ionospheric density and GPS works out the range to each satellite by measuring time and assuming a fixed speed for the radio waves. Civilian receivers will eventually use two radio frequencies and then even these errors can then be corrected for in the mathematical processing in the receiver. So the GPS altitude is the GEOMETRIC altitude above Mean Sea Level accurate to 10 to 20 meters. Pressure Altitude (PA), while being measured and spoken of in length units (feet or meters), is really no such thing. A pressure altimeter measures PRESSURE. This is converted to altitude by applying various assumptions and corrections. Lets take the case where we want to know the altitude above Mean Sea Level using a pressure altimeter. The first thing we know is that the surface pressure varies due to weather systems as we've all seen the surface pressure charts with lines of constant pressure called isobars. The average surface pressure over the entire Earth over the year is taken as 1013.25 HectoPascals(HPa). If our altimeter at the seaside is adjusted so that the reference pressure is 1013.25 HPa the altimeter will read ZERO feet AMSL. As the pressure varies this reference pressure needs to be adjusted so the altimeter still reads ZERO feet AMSL and then the current value for the sea level pressure can be read in the subscale window. Now suppose the sea level pressure happens to be 1013.25 Hpa and the altimeter reads ZERO feet. If we now move our altimeter up to where the pressure is 697 HPa. The instrument will now show that we are at 10,000 feet. However we must add that this is 10,000 feet Pressure Altitude. Only under certain circumstances will this also be the GEOMETRIC altitude above Mean Sea Level. Why is this so (as the late Prof Julius Sumner-Miller used to say)? Consider the column of air between 1013.25 HPA and 697 Hpa. If we heat it, it will expand, cool it, it will shrink. So how far above the 1013.25HPa the 697HPa level is depends on the average temperature of that column of air. Over the years atmospheric observations showed us that the average pressure at sea level was 1013.25 Hpa. Likewise the average temperature of the surface is close to 15 deg C and the average lapse rate is 2 deg C per thousand feet in the lower atmosphere(troposphere) and this “average atmosphere” is called the International Standard Atmosphere (ISA) and aircraft performance calculations and measurements are referenced to this also. Only when the average temperature of the layer between 1013.25 Hpa and 697 Hpa is equal to that in the ISA (in this case 5 deg C) will our Pressure Altitude and GEOMETRIC altitude be equal. How important is this? Well let's take a hot day at Waikerie. Waikerie is close to sea level(~100 feet or so) and let's assume the surface temperature is 42 deg C and we're soaring in thermals so the lapse rate will be very close to Dry Adiabatic (3 deg C per thousand feet). At 10,000 feet Pressure Altitude the temperature will be 12 deg C making the average temperature in the layer to 10,000 feet PA 27 deg C. How do we figure out our GEOMETRIC altitude? Remember those Ideal Gas Laws from high school physics? The volume of a gas at constant pressure is proportional to its Absolute Temperature. In this case we have a constant pressure difference (1013.25 - 697HPa) and a column of constant cross section – say one square meter, so the height of the column will vary according to Absolute temperature. Deg C is converted to Deg Kelvin(Absolute Temperature) by adding 273.15 to the Deg C number so the temperature in the ISA layer is 273.15 + 5 =278.15 deg K and the temperature in the layer on our hot day at Waikerie is 273.15 + 27 = 300.15. The height of the layer will have expanded by the ratio 300.15/278.15 which is 1.079 or close to 8% which is 800 feet! So our GPS receiver which measures GEOMETRIC altitude will read 10,800 feet plus or minus the 35 to 70 feet possible error. At 1000 feet the difference is even worse, about 13% or 130 feet in 1000 feet. You've just discovered why final glides on hot days have a built in margin because your glider cares about GEOMETRIC altitude when it comes to the distance you can glide at a certain glide angle and also why your GPS will report a greater altitude than your pressure altimeter on warm days. Of course we mostly fly gliders in summer when even in Europe the temperature is usually above that in the ISA so it isn't surprising that Flight recorders which record both GPS altitude and Pressure Altitude will on average show that the GPS altitude is greater than Pressure Altitude. Careful consideration of other errors in Pressure Altitude such as static port errors (can easily be greater than 50 feet especially cockpit static as used in Flight Recorders) and instrument errors due to temperature changes in the instrument (easily 30 to 50 feet) convinces me that GPS altitude at 10 to 20 meters (35 to 70 feet) error is superior to Pressure Altitude for soaring performance purposes and this should be used for calculating final glides. Just be careful to add your safety margin as you no longer have the one you didn't know was there. Other branches of sport aviation such as ballooning convert measured pressure altitudes to GEOMETRIC altitude for Record purposes. Soaring doesn't, as far as I know, for badges or records. Mike Borgelt 30 August 2011

Medical emergency helicopters in the USA had a very bad record vs the rest of the helo industry a while back. Having a noble cause sometimes causes problems. Anyone remember the helicopter that crashed in Queensland a few years ago after running out of fuel in fog? 5 dead and IIRC the medical emergency wasn't all that dire.

Yes it is amazing that recips are as good as they are. I like turbines.

A new Rotax in that range is going to cost the same as a Lycoming I think. What is the point? Then there are the issues of ironing out the bugs from an unproven engine.

If you want lower weight go for the ECI experimental engines with carbon oil pan etc.

It is called a Lycoming O-320. Direct drive, air cooled, very simple. Put a Rotec TBI and a couple of Klaus Savier's Lightspeed ignitions on it and you'll get that. I get that even with the old Marvel Schleuber tractor carby.