Kiwi303

I can think of one easy(ish) way to destroy stealth bombers and fighters... never even needing to light up a radar onboard the attacker. Ground based radar tuned to exhaust plumes and turbulence, tied to a skin paint normal radar... any exhaust plume and air disturbance showing a plane moving combined with no hit from the skin paint has a IR camera equipped fighter vectored in. Cryogenic cooled IR camera tracks in on even just the skin heat of a aircraft moving at more than Mach 0.5, Laser designator slaved to the camera lights it up and a AAM with the radar seeker replaced with a laser head homes on the laser dot.

The job of the military is to prepare for the worst case, so the foe looks at you and goes looking for something less deadly to snack on. If they prepared for the best case, the worst case is sure to happen. Isn't there an old saw along the lines of "If you want peace, then prepare for war"? Personally if they made me Min of Defence here, I'd be shopping in China for a couple of squadrons of J-8's and have them fitted with the same APG-66 as were installed in the A4K Kahus. We don't NEED F35s, being small enough that if it comes to a case that we needed front line fighters we're up shit creek without a paddle and the dam has bust sending a wall of brown sweeping down on us. However the J8 is quite capable of carting a few anti-ship missiles off the coast and letting them go, which is about all we need for defence of the island, and is a decent F/A18 class bomb truck for after the allies on any coalition outing have swept the enemy air superiority out of the skies. At a third the cost of a F/A18.

Personally I reckon the Su-34 would be perfect for NZ, long range of 4000km+ and enough capacity to hang 6 Harpoon/RBS15/ASM2/Sea Eagle/NSM etc... if anyone threatens us, we would be best to sink their ships a LONG way from shore.

How come I didn't get a Chinese accent after 13 months in Zhongguo....

That would make shipping easier if they only have to strengthen one portion of the surface of aircraft et al... leave the rest strong enough to handle feet and not much more to save weight. I always wondered why such a WIDE big sucker for a 4 person capacity when a defender 110 which is much smaller can carry 6.

Geeze. thick skin? This place is a Pussy Wimp Pink Candyfluff Paradise compared to the likes of the old Usenet days on Rec.SCUBA and Rec.SCUBA.UK with the late, great AirHog and crew...

I move again sometime next week.

no, I think it was all those washboard thin governesses with canes...

400 seems about right... the internal displacement of the turbocharger looks bigger than the internal displacement of the cylinders....

Back to the original thread topic. I'm New to Aviation... Off tomorrow to Ashburton to the Ashburton Aviation Pioneers to have a dekko at their planes and a chat with whatever instructors I can find around. First time that a free weekend has coincided with nice weather for quite a while! As a little kid at primary school I was in the same class as Max Clears son, my first flight was a joyride in a B22 Bantam, I would occasionally hop on my pushbike and peddle down to the RC model club on saturdays when I was in an RC phase at high school and wander over to the hangers and chat with Max before heading home. Roll on past uni and working in Hamilton to the point where Mum sold her little lifestyle block she bought with Dads life insurance money and bought a bigger productive farm in the southern alps just 15Km from the St Arnaud/Nelson Lakes/Lake Station strip and I came along with my sister to be a farm labourer on a family farm. I took a few rides in a Grob Twin Astir G103 with the Nelson Lakes Gliding Club and considered getting my glider cert... it came down to That, A Motorbike and licence, or TESOL cert and wandering around overseas. TESOL won and I spent 13 months in China. Now I have the itch again for new experiences and am back to flying.

I googled Jabiru J160. 850 NM at 100Knt over 8.5 hours. Plenty to make the hop to Lord Howe Island from Brissie, then skip the usual run to Norfolk island and hop straight over to Kerikeri. Only 777 miles from LH is to Kiwiland. Why not make a transTasman flight and REALLY put it ip the whingers?

So would this count as an Incident Report relating to a communications issue? Seems like CASA would be happy with you.

If it can be commanded by a petty officer or warrant officer, it's a boat. If it requires an Officer, it's a Ship. If it can be commanded by a sailor/private, it's nothing.

If cold discolours chlorophyll... Why do evergreens stay green in sub-zero temps? I guess somewhere like Borneo or north Vietnam where cold is defined as +25 C might have green oranges. I'll stick with orange ones!

Can someone make a Deltic engine that fits on a plane?

they probably mean a flat spin.

110 for me once dressed... a bit less starkers... Most people tend to well underestimate my weight tho since my build actually fits my weight. I was 85Kg once after my first year of flatting alone at uni. bad cooking and unhealthy diet meant I lost weight, and while I was down to a so-called "healthy" weight, I looked bloody gaunt.

given the ages... one thought that popped into my head was drunken mile high club outing with a distracted driver...

If you use an auto diesel engine, you could raid a 2 stroke oil metering device off a twin tank (oil + petrol separate) 2 stroke scooter and run it on jet-A with 2 stroke oil as a lubrication agent. Fill it with diesel and you can just close off the metering device. I understand pure Jet-A is too "Dry" for the seals and pump clearances which rely on road diesel for lubrication.

But you CAN claim the roading tax back every year... Farmers hooning around on quad bikes can build up a big tax overpayment that way and there are at least three companies advertising in the rural papers trying to get farmers to use their rebate filing services...

Yeah, but while it has GST and a bunch of general snatch and grab taxes, it doesn't have about 40c of tax per litre of roading maintenance targeted tax that petrol does. 91 was at 203.9c this morning as I went past the BP in Rolleston, I think I saw a MTA phamplet once that showed for every $1 you pay for petrol, the govt gets around 60c and the petrol company makes a profit of around 2c. the rest is oil and refining and transport overhead. So at current prices, every litre you pump into your car, you're giving the govt $1.20 in revenue, but diesel they only get about 80c.

reading the last page, he's heading to Adak and points west while waiting to hear if he gets russian clearances to stop in far east Russia, probably Petropavlovsk (sp) for fuel. I guess then down Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia and Darwin to follow. If he doesn't get russian clearance, bob around alaska and north america for a while while he decides what do do next. I guess he doesn't have the range to do Adak-Midway-Hawaii-Kiribati-Samoa-Fiji-Solomons-Noumea-Aussie. Adak to Midway is 1620 miles, Midway to Hawaii is 1325 miles. Whats the range of a Searey with a second thank where the passenger would go? It's shorter than the 2400 miles from Hawaii to California, and since Midway was closed as a military base and handed over to the wildlife service as a migratory bird breeding habitat, not so hard to visit.

They are short aspect wings, and don't look like much chord length either. Small wings to keep the silhouette close to authentic means to make the stall speed requirements for microlight/ultralight category registration, it would need a low wing loading equating to a low weight. Add another 2 feet on each wing for a 4 foot addition to the span and it would no longer look quite so realistic from underneath. But should make the UK/EU 450Kg MTOW edit. I googled the UK/EU regs. 300Kg MTOW for single seat landplane, 390 for a two seat landplane. I had seen 450Kg tossed around plenty of times, but turns out that is for a two seat. Which this is not. Dual classes like our NZ 544Kg single seat 600Kg two seat. Plus amphibs get more too.

Nup, 55 gallons, theirs are 208 litres, ours are 200. a small difference, but it can be significant. That 8 litre difference can get lost in the packaging, and they're close enough to stack and be handled together. I think for convenience sake in international transport that the common 44 gallon drums are often just 55 US gallon drums not quite filled to the US mark. A bit like 2x4 is not precisely 2x4 but usually rather 50x100 +/- sawmill slack and warpage.