Bleve97

As an RA-aus pilot, as noted, you can get exemptions, but you don't need a PPL, you can have a GA CTZ endorsement ("PPL lite"), hold some sort of CASA medical, and both must be current.

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It's a great story, and they did amazing things with the most basic tools, but they had the luxury of time - they were doing ~7kts, and had weeks to do it, and all nice visual clues that we use too, some of anyway, not all of which are terribly useful in aviation. They had multi-crew to manage the workload. If they got a bit lost they had time to fix it. You don't hear from the ones that didn't make it though ... Survivor bias again. Harold Gatty has an amazing story too, but .. they were _lucky_ and a lot didn't make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Gatty Prince of Navigators is a good telling of his tale. Seriously, while we learn DR and 1:60 and all that stuff, and look at the charts (electronic, not paper), with a charter pilot hat on, instead of a XC instructor hat, I'm using AvPlan and a Garmin 430. When we get a "you're going to XXXX in YY minutes", you have time to fuel up and bang the plan into AvPlan*, print out the flight log and relevant DAP/ERSA/Country guide pages, look at the satellite pics of the aerodrome if it's unfamiliar, and go. In flight I am managing passengers, fuel and weather, and keeping my iPad cool ? * - NOTAMs, weather etc from AvPlan, brilliant. I have a backup iPad in the plane as per our ops manual, and a phone with it on it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias You don't hear from the ones that didn't make it.

The 1:60 is essentially a dumbed down version of the Small Angle Approximation. It works because the hypotenuse and the adjacent are close enough in length that it doesn't matter in the case of using a compass or gyro for navigation in a very imprecise environment. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-angle_approximation In the charter world, if you did any of this, you'd be looking for a new job. That's what TSO'd GNSS is for.

We get some pretty seriously cold mornings over winter, and correct technique won't cut it. A battery booster is pretty important, and keeping batteries on charge overnight helps too. Sometimes we have to resort to shoving two hair dryers into the cooling vents for 20 minutes to warm up enough to start. Jabs don't like -1 degree starts

Too many lines, not going ;)

Our procedure is electric fuel pump on til ToC.

Any GA flight school can do it. We do at YLIL, a few trips in and out of YMEN and YMMB and you're done

The converting exam includes HF, so you don't have to do both

FWIW, most of my Jab 160 flying is RHS, I only fly LH if doing a maintenance or ferry flight. I found the initial move to RH was only tricky from the POV of the spinner bulge being on the wrong side and it took a couple of landings to get the plane pointed straight. Otherwise, no dramas. If the weather's a bit curly and I'm taking a Jab to Tyabb for maintenance, I fly RHS because I'm more used to it, less likely to test the width of the strip :) Recommended that you do a flight or two with an instructor, just to make sure you're not way off-line on takeoff and landing. The old whiteboard marker on the windscreen trick is good when learning it. I din't find that it made any difference when punting around in Warriors/Archers/Arrows etc.

Casting the net wide! I have a desire to create some high resolution load charts for a PA28R-201 (Arrow V), which is to say that I've made a vector chart for the load envelope, metric and imperial, but I cannot use them, even though the data is exactly the same as the 100th generation scan/crappy print in the aircraft's PoH, just, it's an illustrator file so I can make nice big and clear charts for training exercises. I even sent the charts to Piper, who said : No, we cannot approve his charts. If he was in the US, he could hire a FAA Designated Engineering Representative (DER) to approve his charts. I don’t know if Australia has a similar process. So, I spoke with Bevan from AvPlan, as we also want to get our AvPlan .ac files approved, same issue, need someone with a CASA stamp to agree that 1 is 1, 3x4 does in fact equal 12 and that the envelope corners, copied from the PoH, are correct, then give us a CASA elephant stamp so we can use these files operationally. In Australia, this person is known as, I believe, a "load controller", but google is not being very helpful in finding one. Bueller? Anyone?

Roid!! :)

You could contact the local operator and ask them :) But generally, noise is on climb, not descent.

I've spent some time poking around with a multimeter on Jabs, and it's worth checking for voltage drops from the battery to the radio, to try to isolate where a loss could be. There's a few places that need checking - in particular both sides of the avionics switch and the 12v bus bar. It doesn't take much time and makes finding the problem reasonably simple. Same with earths, being a composite airframe, checking for resistance between the earth on the radio and the battery is worthwhile. I've stumbled onto 0.5-1 volt losses in places, that's enough to make the radio unworkable at low RPM. The alternator putting out <12v at ~1000rpm is "normal", unless it's the high output alternator. Operationally, running the plane at 1200rpm when not explicitly testing idle speed in your pre-takeoff check, is not a bad idea :) IT might not be your reg or alternator, invest a few minutes poking around looking for drops before you go replacing expensive things!

If you're interested, we can do it at Lilydale in Warriors, YMEN and YMMB are close and we do lots of flying into both. Full disclosure : I work at YLIL.

Not for a flying school, that's about right. We do similar with ours.

The changing shape doesn't always work so well on grass strips, where the edges are a lot less distinct. Overthinking for sure - keep the IAS about right and the picture looking good, and 95% of the battle is won. I find putting an attitude marker on the windscreen with a whiteboard marker (poor man's HUD!) works brilliantly - point the marker at the aim point, hold the airspeed with throttle and elevator as appropriate, when the gunk goes under the glare shied, eyes to the end, power to idle (roughly), and try not to land :) Apologies to Mr Jacobson and Kruze ;)

I hold an RA XC rating, and held a GA GFPT (from 2003), now transitioned to an RPL. My RA XC rating was recognised by CASA for my RPL, the rating was carried out well after my GFPT :) So, CASA do recognise RA endorsements even if they've been done post RPL. The form is not clear on this, but it can be done.

We have a drop zone right next to our strip - "stay out". Simple.

I've got a background in elite sports coaching (track sprint cycling, if you're at all interested ....) and love teaching skills and theory to people who genuinely want to learn. Plus, in an aeroplane! In terms of pay, it's better than working for Cycling Australia or the VIS .... believe it or not!

I just tried it, it seems ok, it's just an excel spreadsheet - if you don't have excel, you can open it with Libreoffice or Openoffice (both free, and cross-platform, will work on PC, Mac & various flavours of UNIX). It *might* even open on Google Docs.

that's weird, it was just an excel spreadsheet ... hrm ... will try again

One I knocked up just now, might be useful? MR0.1.xlsx MR0.1.xlsx MR0.1.xlsx

Our pre-landing check in the J160 includes carby heat on, then at ~200-300' AGL on final, carby heat off.