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Vaccination levels are not high enough to make a big difference at a population level, but looking at the rising case numbers I am VERY happy I had my first AZ vaccine back in May, and will be even happier once I have the second one in 2 weeks.

Quite a lot of information out there actually. The immunized are less likely to catch it, and far less likely to end up in hospital or worse. In countries with good vaccination coverage, COVID is being described as a disease of the unvaccinated. Experts have been warning that the Delta variant is extremely dangerous for countries with low vaccination rates i.e. Australia.

All deaths and serious illnesses would be reported, regardless of whether anyone considers it linked. It is part of the monitoring they do, to see whether there is a higher rate than would be expected in the age groups. That way they know if there is something to investigate, even if no-one has made the link. The fact that deaths at a rate of 1 in a million are being detected shows how good the safety protocols are. If you pick a sample of a few million people, particularly concentrating on the elderly, some will die in the period they are being monitored. If you are into meaningless figures, did you know that there are higher rates of pregnancy in women who received the Pfizer vaccine than Astra Zeneca?

If you want blood clots, try COVID 19. Clots are a common problem. It seems to have significant effects on the circulatory system, with inflammation of blood vessels etc. Just about any part of your body with lots of blood flow can be affected. Heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, kidney failure all seem to be common. Even COVID toes and erectile disfunction. Of course death is also a common symptom. It was reported recently that cognitive impairment (i.e. brain damage) is seen in many survivors, including people who had mild or asymptomatic infections. This is a disease that you DO NOT want to catch. It seems like it will cause ongoing health problems in some people for decades. You are far more likely to lose your medical due to COVID organ damage than side effects of the vaccine.

Yes but that's my point. We get what other countries are making. If they stop making ICE vehicles, we won't get ICE vehicles - whether we like it or not. The number of companies investing in ICE cars (let alone right hand drive ICE) is going to drop very swiftly.

How many of those have been designed specifically for Australian requirements? We don't have a car industry anymore, and manufacturers are not likely to keep a ICE line going just for Australia. We need to plan for electric vehicles, otherwise our choices are going to be limited and very expensive, at best. The reality: most people don't do 400+km trips through the outback where there is nothing in between. Most people will buy an electric car because it fills their needs, and will be cheaper and more convenient once we pass the "early adopter" phase. This will make ICE vehicles rare and even more expensive.

Renewable energy is becoming cheaper very quickly. It has been reported that it is cheaper now to build new solar or wind than to operate coal power stations. EVs can potentially help solve the problem of variability, because they have big batteries and can actually return power to the grid if there is a shortfall. With the right software, you could charge your EV when solar and wind are producing a lot of power, and sell the power back for a profit when the renewable energy supplies drop. Power companies obviously don't want that to happen - they want to make the profits themselves - but it just means that some planning and regulation might be required.

Perhaps its not a good time to talk about the reliability of coal, since Victoria yesterday declared an energy emergency due to weather damage to the coal mine. Or there was the time the coal mine caught fire and burned for weeks. And renewable energy is now cheap, and the price is dropping faster than anyone predicted. No-one wants to invest in coal power stations because they know that the energy produced is too expensive to compete with renewables.

I'm not sure about that... I think there is a difference between e.g. "the pilot must ensure that no person" and "the pilot must not permit a person". But it was the section specifically allowing it for repairs and adjustments that makes me chuckle. Yes, I am imagining a meeting where they were trying to write Reg 250 and someone kept saying "but what about Kingsford Smith" until they put in 1B to shut him up.

The rules on carriage of passengers include perhaps my favorite piece of Australian aviation legislation, CAR 250: (1A) The pilot in command of an aircraft must not permit a person to be carried on: (a) the wings or undercarriage of the aircraft; or (b) any part of the aircraft that is not designed for the accommodation of the crew or passengers; or (c) anything attached to the aircraft. (1B) Subregulations (1) and (1A) do not apply to prevent a member of the crew having temporary access to: (a) any part of the aircraft for the purpose of executing repairs or adjustments to the aircraft or its equipment because you wouldn't want to make a rule that would stop people climbing on the wing or undercarriage to make repairs or adjustments in flight!

That paragraph doesn't surprise me. Have you ever bought a used car? As I recall they have similar wording, unless they explicitly offer a warranty as a selling point or it is required by law. I think there was even a standard wording saying that the dealer does not believe the odometer reading is correct. The paragraph has no effect unless you actually want to sue the seller. The seller may have a preference to sell to someone who isn't positioning to be able to sue them if an inaccuracy is found in the log books etc. My reaction is to accept the clause, be aware of what it means and factor it into the price negotiations. Buyer beware is always the underlying principle.

If your base leg is outside the CTR. According to the reports, the collision occurred as he turned final, 3 miles from the airport. I worked out earlier the margin for error with parallel runways at that distance is about 1 degree. Hard to judge visually. Someone else worked out the density altitude was 10500, so TAS would have been significantly higher than IAS. I don't know whether the 160K figure is IAS or ground speed - my guess would be ground speed from ADSB.

There is a big difference between flying a circuit to a parallel runway and joining a 3 mile final. If the reports are accurate, this was the equivalent of aircraft from opposite directions joining straight in approaches to parallel runways from the boundary of the class D at Moorabbin, i.e. over the beach at Aspendale. Would you typically be at 100 KIAS 3 miles from the airfield or a higher speed? If you are mixing with larger aircraft, keeping the speed up until closer in may be desirable.

According to the report I read the collision occurred 3 miles from the threshold, and the runways are 200m apart. My 1 in 60 calculation gives a margin of error of around 1 degree at that distance (or maybe 1/2 a degree, if you want to ensure some separation between the aircraft). If the Cirrus actually flew through the opposite centreline he was misaligned by 2 degrees. That seems pretty high precision to ask of a visual alignment. I'm not sure about tolerances for an ILS.

Carrying the Fire I agree - a very good book

Airspeed should be maintained at the target (recommended) approach speed. Slowing down to lose height is OK, until it isn't. Short field approaches are pretty much by definition riskier than normal approaches - otherwise you would always use the short field speed. Some aircraft have significant inaccuracies in the airspeed indication at slow speeds, so you might not have the margin you think you have.

The restrictor and return line is not there to adjust fuel pressure. If your fuel pressure is incorrect you should find the real reason why.

I wouldn't really recommend this. You certainly get more drag as you slow down but you are also getting closer to stall. You should be keeping speed stable at the target airspeed on approach. If idle power and flaps are not enough to fix the approach, either a slip or go-around are the best options. Depending on the aircraft, increasing speed might also be an option. A C152 at VFE with full flaps has an impressive angle of descent, and loses the speed again quickly. However the Jabiru I flew didn't have enough margin between VFE and approach speed to make this a useful technique.

There was a startup called Better Place trying to build a network of battery swap stations for EVs. It relied on standardized batteries accessible from under the car. In order to access the battery switch station, Better Place customers would have to swipe their membership card. The remaining process was fully automated, similar to going through a car wash, so the driver never had to leave the car The car owner wouldn't own the batteries, they just purchased the electricity. So all the problems with battery degradation etc. would be managed by Better Place across their whole inventory rather than being a risk to the car owner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) Hard to know whether its a better or worse idea than charging stations. Their biggest problem appears to have been no-one driving electric cars at that time.

A reasonable estimate is that a single pump can deliver enough fuel in 1 hour across multiple vehicles to drive 5000 km in total. How much power do you need to provide enough electricity in 1 hour to drive 5000 km?

I don't mean operating continuously. Check my math: My car can do about 800 highway km on a tank. Lets say you can fill 1 car every 10 minutes, that's 4800 km, call it 5000 km worth of energy dispensed per hour. A Tesla supposedly uses approximately 20 kw/h per 100km so 5000 / 100 * 20 = 1000 KWh or 1 MWh per hour = 1 MW equivalent. I think I estimated 10 cars/hour and a more efficient car when I did the original calculation, but that is the order of magnitude. I was prompted to think about it when we passed service stations on the Hume at Easter with queues of cars at every pump. Sure you can charge at home off peak most of the time, but it's the peak capacity when everyone wants to travel on a holiday weekend that poses the problem. Don't get me wrong, I want an electric car ASAP and I know we have to go that way, but we also need to understand the obstacles we have to overcome. I don't believe we are going to get there by waiting for the market to move. Car makers and buyers will wait until the infrastructure exists, and infrastructure builders will wait till the demand exists.

Are there any models without regenerative braking? Regenerative braking is the hybrid's main advantage - all the energy comes from the ICE engine, but regenerative braking allows them to capture much of the energy normal cars lose as heat in the brakes. My point was that the hybrid is probably worst case cost and complexity wise. You have ICE, transmission, fuel system, cooling system, plus electric motor and battery. And it's still only 2K over the ICE only model. There are a surprising number of Tesla's getting around these days. I know someone who regularly drives between Melbourne and Ballarat in their Tesla. We traveled up the Hume at Easter, and were passed by several Teslas on the way. The technology is there when the large car makers decide they want to do it. What we do not have is the charging infrastructure for mass adoption. I think we underestimate the capacity of the energy distribution infrastructure we have built around internal combustion engines. I was doing some back of the envelope calculations, and estimated that a single petrol pump delivers the energy equivalent of about a 2 megawatt charger. So a 10 pump petrol station might be the equivalent of 20 MW charging capacity. And there's another one across the road, and another around the corner. One fuel tanker delivering petrol might have equivalent energy to the South Australian grid battery.

Yes, looks like fun for local flying. The biggest problem if you have limited energy is drag, so I think anything practical to go further will look more like a motor glider i.e. very streamlined with a big wingspan to minimize induced drag. Pipistrel seem to be going that route, their electric aircraft are interesting. If they put their electric powerplant in their Sinus airframe it seems like it would be one of the most practical electric options.

I think Tesla and Toyota at opposite ends of the spectrum show that many EV problems are largely solved. Tesla has range, fast charging and power (see ludicrous mode). Toyota put a battery, electric motor, regenerative braking etc into their hybrid models and only charge a couple of thousand extra on top of the petrol model. If Toyota want to build a full electric car they need a bigger battery and electric motor, but the cost of that should be more than made up by being able to delete the ICE, fuel & exhaust systems, most of the transmission etc. The reason electric cars are expensive is that we don't have the charging infrastructure for mass adoption, and (a) if you can't sell to the masses you have to recoup development costs over a smaller number of vehicles and (b) if you can only sell to a few percent of the population, you might as well target the rich people. Aircraft are a different problem. Cars sit on the ground, they don't need energy to hold them up. With an aircraft, every kg requires energy to keep it in the air. As aircraft get bigger you quickly get into diminishing returns. I don't think that improvements in battery technology will ever solve that problem - there are limits to the energy available from the chemistry that can't be worked around. Synthetic liquid fuels for aviation use seem much more likely to me. https://thebulletin.org/2009/01/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology/

I don't think anyone is arguing with the idea that they refer to different things - rather that it's so obvious it goes without saying. The argument is whether something with a mass of 1 kg weighs anything other than 1 kg, when "weigh" is used in it's everyday usage i.e. stationary on the surface of the earth, ignoring local variations in gravitational force, and using kg to refer to kg-weight. From Wikipedia: The kilogram was originally defined in 1795 as the mass of one litre of water. This was a simple definition, but difficult to use in practice. By the latest definitions of the unit, however, this relationship still has an accuracy of 30 ppm. i.e. the difference between the mass of 1 litre of water and the current SI definition of a kg which uses the Planck constant is less than 0.003%. For our purposes, the mass of 1 litre of water is close enough and much simpler to understand. If you take 1 litre of water, which has a mass of 0.999972 kg using the SI definition and put it on your scales, it is going to read 1 kg within the limits of accuracy of any regular set of scales. All this reference to the Planck constant, Avogadro's number etc. is just obfuscation - it is not necessary for discussion of the topic.