walrus

Skippy, the danger is usually static electricity. There are usually traces of other products (eg ethanol) plus a little water, rust and dirt in mogas that make it conductive enough for static charge to leak away. The dangerous one is jet A1 which is so clean and has a high dielectric constant that it sparks unless it has an anti static additive.. ‘’I use a Bunnings aerospace jiggle siphon and a jerry can myself. The funnel I sometimes use is conductive.

Flightrite and others…….you do know that you are asking for trouble if you don’t use a hose with a conductive lining? You can get away with plastic with mogas sometimes because the impurities make it conductive so charge can leak away. ‘’But a cold morning, clean Avgas and no earth connections?

I am concerned for APS - the simply most wonderful supplier of aviation hardware in Australia at Moorabbin. The most helpful, knowledgeable guys in the country. Going to them with a shopping list of fasteners and suchlike was an absolute pleasure…….and they were charging less for aviation certified fasteners than bunnings charged for Chinese crap nuts and bolts!

As per my opening post, NSW has > 120 community infections. Contact tracing is now pointless. Lockdown may slow progression but now the only thing that will stop the pandemic in NSW is vaccination. The lockdown is at least till Christmas. ‘’You are going to see water filled barriers manned by the Army on state borders before this is over. Police are already preparing to arrest border hoppers.

A few points……… Common law recognises that there are situations requiring people’s traditional liberties to be curtailed. One of those is war, a far more common one is epidemics or pandemics where it is universally accepted that behaviour must be modified to protect the general community. ‘’Classic every day examples include water, sewerage, gas and electricity inspectors as well as fire services, who can “trample on your human rights” any time they like if they think they need to in order to protect the community. ‘’So the idea you can protest lockdowns, etc is wrong in law. Those decisions are legal under the public health act. ‘’So you argue that Covid isn’t real, vaccines don’t work? Sure you can do that - you are arguing that the public health act doesn’t apply - good luck with that. There are enough very sick people to prove you wrong. ‘’Arguing Anything else - gates/soros/ world domination etc.’ then you are with the crazies. ‘’Please get vaccinated.

I was idly thinking of attending the Birdsville races by air - Covid permitting. ‘’I noticed a thread on another aviation website criticizing the shire council for prohibiting under wing camping apparently on liability grounds. There was talk of an appeal to the council… ‘’When I looked at the Birdsville races website, the reason the council has banned under wing camping is obvious - money! The Council bastards have partnered with a commercial tent mob and want $520 for a single person tent in their camp ground for visitors coming by air! http://www.rentatent.com.au/rentatent/events/view/71 I have started a list of places not to visit and Birdsville is now the second entry, after YMMB.

Planesmaker, reference please. If your reference is related to the VAERS website, it’s BS. Get vaccinated.

If you get a chance to fly, then take it to try and keep current. ‘’I have been lucky enough to have a few friends and acquaintances who are closely connected with the pandemic. I was warned last March of what was to come and I have had occasional updates since. ‘’We knew three weeks ago that if Sydney experienced more than 60 community transmission infections then they would lose the whole State. That has now occurred. Lockdowns won’t work anymore because contact tracing and testing is about to be overwhelmed and thus become pointless. That is why the NSW Premiere asked for more vaccines yesterday. That (mass vaccination) is the only solution from now on. This is the current sitrep. Indications are now that the neighboring states will fail to keep the delta virus from spreading - there are not enough police to maintain a “hard border” anywhere. The various states will try but they may not succeed. More lockdowns are expected. If you get a chance to fly, take it. There may not be many opportunities. NSW is preparing for a lockdown until Christmas 2021. Companies with Major logistics operations in NSW have been advised to get as much as possible of their stock, equipment and employees out of the state and to operate from Victoria or Queensland for the foreseeable future. If you are given the opportunity to be vaccinated, take it. AZ is perfectly acceptable as a product. You don’t need to wait for Pfizer, you need vaccination NOW. Ignore the anti vax stupid people and the ‘freedom” protest mob. Within three weeks those unvaccinated folk are going to be sick as dogs. Furthermore, it will become blindingly obvious to all but the chronically cretinous* that the hospitals are full of unvaccinated people - starting with the idiots who went to the superspreader events called demonstrations. * The chronically cretinous will maintain that their unvaccinated supporters have been deliberately poisoned by chemtrails/ gates/soros/ illuminati. Main message : get vaccinated now if you can, then hold on for a very wild ride.

Skippy, you are showing your age. Victoria didn’t invest in a rail system after about 1950 for one very good reason that made perfect sense at the time: - we had Communist controlled, bloody minded railway and tram unions that made public transport an expensive and unreliable nightmare for the general public. That was why we built freeways instead. ‘’The unions were always going on strike on any pretext. Productivity was awful. Any new investment in technology was declared “black” by the unions until more pay was extracted, even then technology was hobbled by outdated work practices so that it never produced a positive return on investment….. ‘’So we gave up investing in what was then a shyte form of transport, operated by communist scum. It was only after Jeff Kennett broke up the unions that investment in public transport again became possible. ‘’As an older Melburnian, I can tell you that even Today I will NEVER rely on public transport and as for using it to shift goods in a business setting, the risk is just too great. Give me a truck that I own every time.

Cojones, the problem is not “economic demand” but marginal productivity - my inner city commute is to buy an ice cream - there is no economic cost to making the trip by foot or by bus or not at all. The country trip is 40km to buy 5Litres of Grazon to kill Capeweed. There is a very different economic cost associated with that transaction. That is why 10 litres of diesel fuel is worth more to an Indian farmer who uses it to run a cultivator than to a Sydney housewife who wants to get her hair cut.

KGW and others, yes. We can do hydrogen fuel cells. We can do ammonia. We can do fast EV’s, we can do self driving cars. We can do electric aircraft and people carrying drones. Yes! You are correct! What I was talking about was LOGISTICS. …….And I’m talking about it in the context of a country (Australia) that couldn’t do a set piece fibre optic national communications system - NBN! And today has royally ##4%ed up the rollout of a Covid19 vaccine! ‘’Here is an exercise for you. Visit a Hume Highway truck stop - Gundagai, Wallan, wherever. Park, order your Macdonald’s and coffee. Sit down eat your food while counting and timing the flow of cars and trucks through the bowsers. Time how long each car spends at the bowser. ‘Now do the maths; an electric car is probably 80% efficient compared to 30% for an IC vehicle. The average fuel economy per car is maybe 10 l/100 km. say we are travelling 1000 km. That means an upload of 100 litres. Now work out that in energy - mega joules, divide by say 3 and that number times the car throughput gives you the number of kilowatt hours the station must dispense per hour. Work out the Amperage at say 20,000 volts for transmission lines. ‘’Without yet doing the fill up time calculation - which probably means quadrupling the size of the servo, I think you will find that the power transmission required for the station is huge. This demand is not going to be met by a few solar cells behind the station, or batteries, or wind. You are looking at 20,000 volt power lines and a major substation probably bigger than the servo itself! Than of course we have not broached the issue of reliability of supply or redundancy. Now multiply this issue by a country larger than europe with sparse population outside capital cities…..and you want charging infrastructure/?? These issues make the NBN and Covid19 vaccination look like child’s play. …….and this is just one aspect vehicle charging. QLest you think I’m a luddite, I have a 9KW solar system and would love an electric car - once it can do a 1000km round trip at 100 kmh fully loaded at weight close to 3 tons and pulling a trailer.

Best investment today: legacy oil production, distribution and refining. Best personal investment - state of the art diesel and petrol vehicles, period. The EV killer is logistics - world production of copper, rare earths(for magnets), lithium, plus electricity production and distribution. Do the maths. ‘’This stuff works small scale and for rich people. European rich cities like Scandinavian ones. ‘’Now try and imagine places like South Sydney, Footscray, Watts(LA), the Banliues around Paris, electric cars and infrastructure for poor people? It’s not going to happen yet. Better yet, take the TV series “bush mechanics” and imagine an EV version.

From the CASA Flight test handbook, if there is no stall break (as in your power off condition) then the stall speed is taken as the speed when your stick is fully back and reaches the rear stop as you keep it level. I have fixed L/E slats and no detectable “break” -so far…….

My own anecdotal enquiries of the occasional Qantas pilot is that CASA hasn’t had the technical ability to supervise a major airline for at least the last thirty or more years. One of them told me: “they asked questions and we fed them bullshyte answers till they went away”. ‘’However the more important question is whether CASA has more political clout than Qantas? I think not. As for the AG Department, they know nothing about aviation. They can check the paper clip stock records and that’s as far as it will go.

“wandering all over the sky” is safer than following a GPS course between published waypoints.

Today I crossed tracks exactly with another aircraft, exact enough for visual and ADSB confirmation . There was a 3000 ft altitude difference. So what? you say. Absent ADSB I would not even have known to look up and see the other aircraft. If I had been on climb and the other guy on descent, well……. ‘’The ADSB technology disproves, in my opinion, the big sky theory. Near misses are a lot more common than we think.We just don’t notice them most of the time.

Outsourcing CASA will just increase our costs.

believe it or not, some grade 3 instructors dont do it.

Kasper, regarding flap asymmetry, in the absence of an asymmetry cutout circuit, I was taught always to extend flaps while straight and level. That way you will sense a failure as an uncommanded roll. If you extend flaps while turning you may not sense the failure until too late.

I watched the latest issue last night - double slotted leading edge -oh my! I’m fascinated. It will be interesting to see how the old rule applies: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” - there is going to be a compromise somewhere. ‘’The complexity of the ingenious linkages is a concern from a reliability perspective, also the rib design and manufacture. The design looks very elegant and the construction ingenious. My concerns now are aeroelasticity - friction, flutter, etc. Fatigue in all that lovely cnc machined lacework and failure modes. ‘’For fatigue, I’d be tempted to shot peen (or equivalent) everything, although I know it doesn’t matter on this “one off” special which has a short life anyway. I’d like to know the loads in the actuation system because the torque tube will twist (wind up) a little and you want everything to stay in alignment under load. Similarly friction in the actuation system when the wing is loaded - there should be self aligning bearings everywhere. Failure modes? Flap asymmetry will kill you. How do you guard against it? I could go on…..but for me watching this series is like a cook watching Masterchef - highly addictive.

Fun to watch……..”back to work”.

…..Which is chronicled on Pprune.,….. I am concerned for his health and well being. ‘’This case, in my opinion, will scare off anyone wishing to invest in this industry, as will the sagas of Bristell, Jabiru and Angelflight. Couldn’t the Act be changed to allow CASA some leeway to promote investment in aviation?

Quote from an American Forest service officer charged with trying to develop a bear proof rubbish bin/; ‘’There is a considerable IQ overlap between the dumbest tourists and the smartest bear!” I think the average Kelpie or border collie could land most aircraft if they wanted to.

Jack, put your mind at rest, you can't get pinged by Bristell. The Directors of the company that is RAA could perhaps be sued, but all that is available to Bristell if they won are the assets of the company and its Directors and perhaps a D & O insurance policy if RAA has one. Clause 60 and 61 of the Constitution covers the matter. Bristell may also want to consider if they want to perhaps alienate future RAA pilots wanting Bristell products.

There is very little point in Bristell suing RAA in my opinion because even if Bristel won a judgement, there is unlikely to be any money in it. The members are not liable beyond losing the subscription money they paid. I assume RAA has a D & O (Directors and Officers) policy, but I would be surprised if money from that was available to a Bristel lawsuit.