FlyBoy1960

what is PLA ?

I saw this in an aircraft at Oshkosh a long time ago. Apparently according to the Rotax people they had the engine all of the way through certification and it was going to be approved for many different types of aircraft including many four seat aircraft. Once it became known to the legal teams in Rotax HQ which I think from memory they said was bombardier in Canada the engine was immediately canned. Their concern was liability. Apparently they can handle accidents happening in two seat recreational aircraft but with this bigger engine it could be fitted into four seat certified aircraft and this was the nail in the coffin. They only ever built about 20, about 15 of these were used for testing to destruction and the other five were used for test flights. The one at Oshkosh was in a really big Tail-wheel aircraft, I can't remember it exactly but it may have been a moose or something like this. It was really unfortunate that the legal team were scared of litigation and being able to carry twice as many people was the reason for the program cancellation and the immediate destruction of all of the engines. All of them were destroyed except a mockup that is now in Austria HQ from what I could find researching this about five years ago. The one on display at Oshkosh was painted bright yellow and not the red shown in the photograph.

great story

Only works on a good day otherwise you need to be on an IFR flight plan. Any cloud will ruin your plans, it is usually clear at Armidale and the cloud bank is not visible until you are about 50 miles from the coast and you just keep going lower and lower and lower to get underneath it until you are tree bashing. On a perfect day with clear blue sky it is a good option but 9 days out of 10 it is not the safest way of crossing the range. Ideally you want to be in lower locations like the Newcastle where you can come down very quickly from Mudgee and across all going up to Warwick where you can sneak across a range and get into the coastal area

For the absolute best safety I would transit via Warwick, over the great divide to Boonah and then down into the Lismore Valley. Anywhere north near Armidale all the way through to just south of Warwick is very high country and you need to cross over a lot of tiger country with very few landing opportunities to get to the coast. This would be my recommendation for an inland route, for a more scenic flight coastal go Cowra to Mudgee, Mudgee through to the north of Newcastle, probably through the valley at Gloucester and then up the coast to Byron. You will have controlled airspace at Coffs Harbour but they always let recreational aircraft through provided you have a working radio and transponder. Tyagarah is a great airfield but it is a little bit rough at the moment, Ballina is completely security controlled. Perhaps go there one direction and back the other.

as I read this it was the pilot who was suing the Council and the organisers of the fair and he lost because payment is to the defendants. It must've been really bad representation for and on behalf of the pilot because negligence is solely with the positioning of the Ferris wheel being inside the profile for the airstrip. If the airstrip was shut and he flew into the Ferris wheel then it would be the pilots fault (in my opinion), the airstrip was however open and the Ferris wheel inside the airstrip profiles. This is no different than some idiot doing burnouts on the runway while you are landing and you run into him, how can it be your fault when the other party is operating/acting illegally ? Sometimes, I just don't understand judgements from people who don't know anything about aviation, the rules and regulations. In this case it is obvious that the pilots legal counsel did not get the message across

I have been traumatised myself I reading all of this, watching the video and looking at some photographs. Where is my compensation please ?

"ATSB reported the failure rate for Jabiru engines declined between 2012 and 2013 from 3.9 to 3.25 per 10,000 hours while Rotax failures went up from 1.52 to 2.6 per 10,000 hours." The Jabiru numbers declined perhaps because fewer people were flying in Jabiru aircraft at the time of all of these problems? Rotax numbers have always been questionable in this report because they also include the two-stroke engines and not just four-stroke engines, so it is obvious that Rotax failures are over reported and not really indicative of the four-stroke fleet

The problem I have seen with a lot of the foil type ground planes is that they deteriorate over time especially on a surface that can flex like a fabric aircraft and you can start to lose your grounding because it breaks away from the aerial base. On a composite aircraft, no problem but on a rag and tube aircraft you need to be more careful. The only reason they make aircraft out of metal any more is to get a good ground plane #$&^%@😁

How many do you want ? there are just about as many dead Microair radios at our airfield than there are rebuilt Jabiru engines ! I know of about three or four and will ask the owner on Saturday when I am at the airport

if the intercom is operating normally and the only time you are getting excessive noise is when you press the transmit button and all you need to do is turn down the sidetone. You want the side tone to match the same volume as the intercom that way you are getting level audio.

Well, how many Jabiru's are being flown ATM ? if there are 100 Rotax hours to only one Jabiru hour then of course the statistics are going to be weighted

Playing devil's advocate, you need to work out why you are only getting one new user every week whereas before you are getting several every day. Personally, I don't like all of the changes all of the time, it confuses me and being an old person I like things to be simple and the same all the time, I don't like change. This could be why some people are not coming back again. It could be their interests have changed and they are no longer interested, it could be that they have found better platforms which do things differently. I know I discovered the few places on Facebook three or four months ago and they are also pretty good with a lot of the same people here and there as well (or at least I think they are the same by their usernames) are the Facebook sites any better than this site ? that is an answer I cannot give because they all seem to be about the same to me although I find the Facebook feed the just give me information I want to look at and not have to go searching. Maybe it is better to follow the masses and change to Facebook but I do know that you lose control of everything from what I can see and the sooner can find a way to push advertising and monetise a platform for your group they will ! There just seems to be a lot more people on Facebook rather than the 10 or 15 names you see here every day

There are reports on PPrune at this particular serial number had a history of engine problems which they could not locate or identify and it had had engine outs previously if you read between the lines from somebody that it obviously being flying the aircraft before

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/244642 No mention of the type of aircraft or anything like that

What's the lesson ? Stay away from twins ?

some of us in Queensland are still waiting for the voting papers to arrive with the first new edition of sport pilot magazine. contacted the RA-Aus head office several times but nothing ever happened, no voting papers and no magazine !

you are making some really big assumptions here about an aircraft being able to be flown overweight in other countries. They may not have the same G requirements as Australia, I believe, our G requirements are based on international standards plus the weather that can be expected in Australia to affect an aircraft during flight. Just because somebody says they fly at 700 kg overseas is probably true but it will most certainly be at a reduced G loading so instead of +4-2 you could be +2-1 in which case your aircraft will either be damaged or break in our turbulence. There are standards and rules for a reason, commonly these are written in blood of those before you. CASA or RA-Aus has a requirement of a required payload which is one hour of fuel, two persons of 86 kg each and if you add this together and don't have enough payload based on the aircraft empty weight then the aircraft cannot be registered as an LSA and would have to go into some sort of experimental category with CASA. We saw this happen at our airport previously when the RA-Aus came up to measure some aircraft that were being assembled that were obviously much heavier than being claimed, then all of a sudden they went on to the VH register after the RA stickers were removed

The Bolly in-flight adjustable is being tested/developed at our airfield. There have been a couple of blades that have let go and the other day (about three weeks ago) the propeller went into beta mode at about 200 AGL after rotation requiring the aircraft to crash land into a pond. I am not sure if they are going to keep going with the project

That was just STUPID !

Yes all good now !

I have also lost the little icon thing from the shortcuts on my browser bar ?

I have said this before and I don't want it to sound like a real complaint but every time you change the site I go round and round in circles again and again. It would be good if it was just left the same for us old users

the silicon tape is probably more needed on the fuel lines which in your photos have not been completed

I would like to say - That's good news. But it isn't, another aviator lost